Abstract
Central Michigan University (CMU) uses a web-based portal for its students, staff, and faculty to pay bills, register for classes, stay current with school events, and to accomplish many other important and useful tasks. Since so many people depend on this portal structure, the interface must be intuitive and easy to use and navigational hierarchies must be clearly organized. In order to test a new portal system, a usability study was devised and applied. Analysis of the results prescribed a set of modifications for a more efficient user experience. A second tier of research was performed on the modified portal and the results were again analyzed. Both sets of analysis were compared to see if the changes had made a measurable difference in usability. The results demonstrated that first time users were more likely to have issues navigating the portal than users who have used it before the study. It was apparent that the first time users had a hard time finding what the needed to move to the next place they wanted to go. This shows that the navigational hierarchy of portal structures is a critical factor for navigating users to resources efficiently.
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Brooks, M., Munro, D., Lee, R. (2010). Usability Studies of Web-Based Portal Structures in Academia (Specifically, iCentral). In: Lee, R. (eds) Computer and Information Science 2010. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 317. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15405-8_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-15405-8_18
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