Topic > A Heuristic Evaluation Approach with a Case Study of Sialkot University Website

Table of contentsIntroductionRelated worksMethodologyPilot studyPre-usability testingPre-usability test results graphPost-usability testingConclusionReferencesAuthors' profilesSummary: This research will indicate the degree of usability of a web interface. Using a case study from the official website of Sialkot University. It is very important to maintain the usability of such a website that displays content for millions of users due to its high usability. Nowadays all company information is on the website, so a user or student user of a university website can easily view the information as they want. Designers are working hard to make minimalist design for better user experience. Usability inspection is a technique for evaluating different issues in a website's design (e.g. navigations, interactivity, relevance, and reliability). There are several methods to evaluate the usability of a website that help designers develop a user-friendly design, heuristic evaluation is one of them. Identify different usability issues of the previous website using the pilot study method and implementing the heuristic points on a new website. The results of the difference between the two website designs will clearly show that the website designed following the heuristic evaluation points is much more usable than the previous website. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original EssayIndex Terms: Heuristic Evaluation, Website Design, User-Friendly Design, Pilot Study, Website Usability InspectionIntroductionWebsite Usability Inspection with Heuristic Evaluation and Pilot Study is a research-based project and on development that will help website users experience a realistic and authentic user interface. By having an educational website under review, this website will be easier to use. Every year hundreds of students apply to different educational institutions. Sialkot University is a university recognized by the Higher Education Council (HEC), Sialkot. Every year almost 2 thousand students apply online through the site. So it is very important to have a completely user friendly website that can help users find everything they need about the university. We applied a usability inspection test to understand how the website delivers information to users. Requirements gathering is the first and important method of usability checking. For requirements gathering we examined this website with the pilot project and found that it is not usable as requested by the users. In this pilot study we focused on the time constraint. A 9-question questionnaire will help us identify the site's major usability problems. We had prepared 9 tasks on a paper questionnaire. These 9 tasks were then implemented by users from different programs and departments. Mostly students with computer science background can easily understand the functionality of a website and navigate to any section they want of the website. Our research specifically identifies usability issues experienced by a non-IT user and an IT user of the site web. Every user involved in this research will perform these 9 tasks on the website. We will record the screen of the device on which the user will perform the activity. These tasks involve testing different website features and seeing how often a website is easy for a user to understand its features.In our research, we have 9 users who performed this task and we recorded the video of each one. As we received material for inspection, we gradually watched each video and identified how long it took users to complete the individual task. By completing the following exercise we had recorded all the data in an Excel sheet to compare it with the new website. After completing the research on the previous website, we developed a new website with a new design and keeping in mind all the problem points that we had found in the previous research on the website. When the development and design of the new website was ready and active, we repeated the exercise on the new website and compiled the results. In the new website we continue to solve all the problems of the previous one and focus on implementing the heuristic evaluation rules on our new website. Heuristic evaluation is also recognized as one of the best usability inspection methods that we focused on in our study. Jakob Nielsen identified 10 heuristics from a document of 249 usability principles. Below are the 10 heuristics we have applied on our new website. System visibility System-to-real-world correspondence User control standards Consistency and standards Error prevention Recognition rather than recall Flexibility and efficiency of use Aesthetic and minimalist design Helps users users to recognize, diagnose and recover from errors Help and documentation The design of this website is according to Neilson heuristics standards. The design of this website is developed after comprehensive research and user feedback. The final result is discovered by comparing the study of both the previous website and the new website. This study plans to focus on the key factors of human-computer interaction (HCI) which also include effectiveness, efficiency, controllability, attractiveness and satisfaction. Related Work This section provides literature reviews that focus on usability attributes, metrics and also techniques used by other researchers in recent years related to usability evaluation on websites and web portals. Roy, Pattnaik and Mall, 2014 [5] focus on evaluating usability and accessibility on the websites of three educational institutions. They began by conducting a pilot study to identify some of the frequent activities that are typically performed on academic websites by college students with IS. They evaluated usability in terms of attractiveness, controllability, efficiency, availability and learnability using the W AMMI questionnaire and also evaluated effectiveness based on task success by identifying whether users are able to complete tasks successfully, efficiency by task completion time in terms of time needed to complete a task successfully and number of clicks users had to make on the website to complete a task and satisfaction with 68 participants. For accessibility, they assessed against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 using the “AChecker” tool. The result of the study shows the usability score for each of the website attributes and also found the positive impact of task completion time on the satisfaction levels of the participants. GraniC, Mitrovic and Marangunic in 2011 [2] evaluated eight (8) most visited websites -reach portals in Croatian in two study phases, four (4) portals in each study. The goal of their study is to see the result of both usability testing method and heuristic evaluation in terms of the result ofusability evaluation and found that both methods are complementary to provide a better usability evaluation result. They started by conducting the pilot study to identify the activities needed to perform the usability evaluation. In the first phase of the study, they conducted a scenario-driven user evaluation with 30 users by performing semi-structured interviews to measure attractiveness, task-based user tests to measure efficiency based on time spent on the task, and effectiveness based on to the percentage of activity completed; and subjective evaluation using the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire to measure user satisfaction. In the second study, they conducted the same approach as the first study but with a smaller number of participants i.e. 16 users, four instant experts and four human-computer interaction (HCI) experts. The main contribution of this research is the result of both rounds. The result of the evaluations was very clear and clear, which suggests that both types of evaluations are complementary to each other in usability evaluation. In the study conducted by A. Jabar, Usman and A wal in 2013 [6], they were evaluating the usability of University Website from the perspective of 364 university students to investigate whether the area of ​​specialization chosen by students has impacts significant on usability factors. They conducted a survey using the W AMMT questionnaire to evaluate attractiveness, controllability, usefulness, efficiency and learnability and converted the evaluation result 39 into the form of merit point to know the level of usability for each of the usability factors. The results of the study identify that the area of ​​specialization chosen by the students resulted in different perspectives in the usability evaluation result. For this reason, it is necessary to pay more attention to usability factors when designing an educational website. Methodology The study includes all aspects of usability inspection and implementation of HCI standards. The table shows the pilot study including all procedures for inspecting and improving usability. Technical Phases Character Attribute Pre-usability testing • Heuristic evaluation • Number of activities completed • Time taken to perform each activity Post-usability testing • Heuristic evaluation • ScorePilot Study A pilot study is conducted to identify some specific activities normally performed on the site by users of the site itself. Since the university provides students with a variety of information related to the university. Most commonly the student's online application for admission. List of courses and fee structures of each course and all other details such as events, news and important dates. 10 activities were drawn up to test different features of the website and its performance. All tasks are based on Neilson's heuristic evaluation rules. Pre-usability testing Pre-usability testing is classified into two sections of observation and survey. The system observation was carried out to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of the website. The survey was conducted to evaluate the heuristic evaluation rules on the website. For observing effectiveness, two metrics were measured which included the number of tasks completed and the number of accurate tasks conducted by the champions. Ten (10) sample users were asked to perform a draft task on the website to evaluate the efficiency of the website. The response to these tasks was recorded. The Icecream video recorder was used to record the screen while the sample user performed the task on the website. This gave the exact ratio of the time spent by the user forperform a specific task. The time chosen for the observation and survey corresponded to the requirement that the site performance assessment must be carried out during peak hours of use, i.e. from 9:00 to 13:00 and from 14:00 to 4:00 of working days The survey was conducted by physically going to each department to collect data from all departments that use the university website as a source of information. The recorded videos include a complete evaluation of each activity of each department. The deployment occurred accordingly as IT departments are more likely to be familiar with websites and online portals, so we conducted our survey among non-IT related users who were not familiar with the website's backend features. pre-usability testing results The results collected from the samples would then be organized into a graph of results found and results not found by the users of the sample. The graph shows the results of each sample question. The blue line in the graph shows the number of results found, and the red line shows the number of questions that were not found in the results. Post-usability testing The post-usability testing is performed on the new website that we will have created after analyzing the results taken from the pre-usability tests of the main website. Post-usability testing involves a two-stage survey and collection of results. The blue line in the graph shows the number of results found, and the red line shows the number of questions that were not found in the results. Conclusion In this article, a series of heuristics is applied to a website to improve its usability. Websites are the most common and best way to learn about someone's business. In this case the websites of schools, colleges and universities are subjected to random review. As we know, most universities, schools and colleges offer online admission to students. So it is very important that the university or college website is easy to use and helps students to apply easily. In this research we consider each student or candidate under consideration as a student who is not related to information technology or does not have technological information such as a medical or political science student. Please note: this is just an example. Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get Custom Essay This user-friendly interface of the website will help these kind of candidates/students to apply easily online without any hassle. This will also help the university, college or school to display their notices on the website and a user/student can easily find them on the website. In short the site with minimum complexity and maximum ease of use.ReferencesG. Waloszek, "SAP Design Guild - Portal Usability - Is There Such a Thing", 200l. [Onlinej. Available: http://www.sapdesignguild.org/editions/edition3/portal_usab.aspA. Granic, I. Mitrovic, and N. Marangunic, “Exploring the usability of web portals: a Croatian case study,” Int. J. Inf Manage., vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 339-349, August 2011.Mul timemedia Development Corporation. “Ivlalaysia Government Portal and Websites Evaluation (lIGPWA) 2013.” 2014.J. Offutt 'Web quality attributes.' IEEE Software, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 25-32, 2002S. Roy, P. K. Pattnaik, and R. Mall. “A Quantitative Approach to Evaluate the Usability of Academic Websites Based on Human Perception,” Egypt. Computer Science J., vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 159-167, September 2014.MA Jabar, UA Usman, and A. Awal, 'Assessing TIle Usability Of University Websites From Users' P erspective,' Aust. J. Basic application! . SCi., vol. 7, no. 10, pp. 98-111, 2013. Smith, S., & Mosier, J. (1986, August). LINES.