USABILITY ENGINEERING

Usability Engineering



Usability Engineering

Introduction

Websites can be categorized into several main types, such as a personal website, a commercial website, a government website, and a non-profit organization website [1]. Within these categories, websites can either function in a static or dynamic manner. For a static website, information stays the same and is displayed in the same way to all viewers. The available information stays consistent for extended periods of time; any changes are made by the website owners and are generally large undertakings. Static websites are quicker and cheaper to develop. Conversely, a dynamic website changes more frequently and is therefore more costly to maintain. The new and differing content in dynamic websites brings users back, as users may wish to explore the new material, and often makes the website more functional. Websites, in addition to the variation of being either static or dynamic, have differences in the amount of interaction users can have with them. Interactive websites allow users to make actions related to the website's content, such as customizing the homepage's content, making a purchase, or playing a game. Dynamic websites tend to have more interactive functionality than static websites. Given the existing variations in type, purpose, and complexity among websites, it is natural for website interfaces to be designed with different intentions in mind. As such, users may be required to interact in a different manner when performing tasks. The users interacting in different manners presents issues when evaluating websites for usability considerations, as no single evaluation method will be ideal in every case. Usability is a quality attribute that assesses the degree to which users can perform a set of required tasks. It incorporates the five components of learn ability (how quickly people can learn to use something), efficiency (how efficient they are while using it), memorability (how memorable it is), errors (how error-prone it is), and satisfaction (how much users like using it) [1]. Some usability problems include the lack of a search bar on a content-heavy website, tiny font sizes, not changing the color of visited links, inconsistencies in design across pages, and content appearing too similar to an advertisement.

In this paper, we examine three different websites using two different evaluation methods. The websites that will be examined consist of a university website (purdue.edu) [2], a news website (CNN.com) [3], and an e-commerce website (eBay.com) [4]. Together, the three examined websites cover a range of genres and exhibit a wide variety of design styles, so they represent a good cross section of current websites. The examined websites also display varying levels of interaction and the extent to which their content is static or dynamic. The evaluation methods that will be used are heuristic evaluation and user testing. There are hundreds of available checklists that can be used to perform a heuristic evaluation, but for this paper the checklist used was identical to that used by Vilaca in a Master's thesis [5]. Whereas Vilaca's thesis compared the results of heuristic evaluation and user testing ...