Towards a more usable academic library web site: a case study

Since most academic libraries have already built their online presence, the usability of those library web sites becomes an important issue. This paper describes a usability study on the Duke University's Perkins Library Web site, which was conducted to evaluate the design of the web site, identify usability problems, and set benchmarks for measuring future site designs. Nineteen tasks and two questionnaires were designed for a usability test with twenty participants. The results of the test were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively, and suggestions for the improvement of the Perkins Library Web site were made

Measurement of User Perceived Web Quality

Web sites are now considered an extension of the entire business, not just an additional channel or storefront or a simple information portal for the company. Creating an effective web site that gives a positive overall experience to the customers and visitors is important in business today. Measuring the quality of web site from the users’ perspective, will give a fast and early feedback to the firm and enables it to take corrective actions and improve its operations. Several instruments and methodologies were developed to measure the web site performance, usability and quality in information systems, marketing and operations management literature. This study reviews the literature in web quality measurement and employs a 25 item instrument developed by Aladwani and Palvia to measure the user perceived web quality. It attempts to test the factorial validity of the instrument in Australian context using Structural Equation Modelling technique. Analysis revealed that the data set do not fit the Aladwani and Palvia’s model well enough

Privately Waiting – A Usability Analysis of the Tor Anonymity Network

As the Internet is increasingly absorbing information from the real world it becomes more important to prevent unauthorized collection and abuse of personalized information. At the same time, democratic societies should establish an environment helping not only their own people but also people who face repressive censorship to access public information without being identified or traced. Internet anonymization tools such as Tor offer functionalities to meet this demand. In practice, anonymization of Internet access can only be achieved by accepting higher latency, i.e., a longer waiting time before a Web site is displayed in the browser, and therefore reducing its usability significantly. Since many users may not be willing to accept this loss of usability, they may refrain from or stop using Tor – at the same time decreasing the anonymity of other users, which depends on shared resources in the Tor user community. In this paper1, we quantify the loss of usability by measuring the additional latency of the Tor software and combine our measurements with metrics of the existing Web usability and performance literature. Our findings indicate that there is still a major usability gap induced by Tor, leading to its possible disuse accompanied by a higher risk exposure of Internet users

What is usability in the context of the digital library and how can it be measured?

This paper reviews how usability has been defined in the context of the digital library, what methods have been applied and their applicability, and proposes an evaluation model and a suite of instruments for evaluating usability for academic digital libraries. The model examines effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, and learnability. It is found that there exists an interlocking relationship among effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. It also examines how learnability interacts with these three attributes

Utilising IGV approach to identify factors affecting web usability

Due to the changing nature of Internet technology and user needs,continuous web evaluation has become very important in determining the usability of web sites. However, web designers often face problems in identifying the right criteria for evaluation. Despite the growing number of guidelines and other literature on web design and evaluation,each of them varies in terms of quality, coverage, relevancy, and suitability. With this in mind, a study using IGV approach was carried out to identify key generic criteria that need to be taken into consideration by designers or others when assessing the overall usability of web sites. The results of the study include a comprehensive list of the identified usability criteria that were grouped into 7 major factors - screen appearance, content, accessibility, navigation, media use, interactivity, and consistenc

Evaluating electronic textbooks : a methodology

EBONI (Electronic Books ON-screen Interface) [1] builds on the premise to emerge from the Visual Book [2] and WEB Book projects [3], that appearance is important in the design of electronic textbooks, and offers an evaluation model, or general methodology, from which ebook usability experiments in a range of areas can be extracted and remain comparable at a basic level. The methodology sets out options for selecting material, participants, tasks and techniques, which vary in cost and level of sophistication. Results from each study will feed into a set of best practice guidelines for producing electronic textbooks on the Web, reflecting the requirements of students and academics throughout the UK

PERFORMANCE EVALUATION ON QUALITY OF ASIAN AIRLINES WEBSITES – AN AHP PPROACH

In recent years, many people have devoted their efforts to the issue of quality of Web site. The concept of quality is consisting of many criteria: quality of service perspective, a user perspective, a content perspective or indeed a usability perspective. Because of its possible instant worldwide audience a Website’s quality and reliability are crucial. The very special nature of the web applications and websites pose unique software testing challenges. Webmasters, Web applications developers, and Website quality assurance managers need tools and methods that can match up to the new needs. This research conducts some tests to measure the quality web site of Asian flag carrier airlines via web diagnostic tools online. We propose a methodology for determining and evaluate the best airlines websites based on many criteria of website quality. The approach has been implemented using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to generate the weights for the criteria which are much better and guarantee more fairly preference of criteria. The proposed model uses the AHP pairwise comparisons and the measure scale to generate the weights for the criteria which are much better and guarantee more fairly preference of criteria. The result of this study confirmed that the airlines websites of Asian are neglecting performance and quality criteria

Determination and evaluation of web accessibility

The Web is the most pervasive collaborative technology in widespread use today; however, access to the web and its many applications cannot be taken for granted. Web accessibility encompasses a variety of concerns ranging from societal, political, and economic to individual, physical, and intellectual through to the purely technical. Thus, there are many perspectives from which web accessibility can be understood and evaluated. In order to discuss these concerns and to gain a better understanding of web accessibility, an accessibility framework is proposed using as its base a layered evaluation framework from Computer Supported Co-operative Work research and the ISO standard, ISO/IEC 9126 on software quality. The former is employed in recognition of the collaborative nature of the web and its importance in facilitating communication. The latter is employed to refine and extend the technical issues and to highlight the need for considering accessibility from the viewpoint of the web developer and maintainer as well as the web user. A technically inaccessible web is unlikely to be evolved over time. A final goal of the accessibility framework is to provide web developers and maintainers with a practical basis for considering web accessibility through the development of a set of accessibility factors associated with each identified layer

Public Web Mapping: preliminary usability evaluation

April 5 - 7, 200

Measuring children's search behaviour on a large scale

Children often experience problems during information-seeking using traditional search interfaces and search technologies, that are designed for adults. This is because children engage with the world in fundamentally different ways than adults. To design search technologies that support children in effective and enjoyable information-seeking, more research is needed to examine children’s specific skills and needs concerning information-seeking. Therefore, we developed an application that can monitor children’s search behaviour on a large scale. In this paper, we present the steps taken to develop this application. The basis of the application is UsaProxy, an existing system that is used to monitor the user’s usage of websites. We have increased the accuracy of UsaProxy and have developed an application that is able to extract useful information from UsaProxy’s log files