Abstract
For university websites to be successful and to increase the chance of converting a prospective student into a current student, it is necessary to increase the visibility and accessibility of all related content so that a student can achieve their desired task in the fastest possible time. The criteria for evaluating university websites are very vague and are usually unknown to most developers, which adversely impacts the user-experience of the students visiting such websites. To solve this problem, we devised a usability metric and examined the leading university websites to analyze whether these websites were able to meet the requirements of students. In this research, we applied qualitative and quantitative approaches by considering 300 students and evaluating 86 university websites (26 from Canada, 30 from the United States, and 30 from Europe) based on a six-attribute metric comprising navigation, organization, ease of use (simplicity), design (layout), communication and content. From the evaluation results, we find that the 88% of the students are satisfied with our proposed usability attributes, but that most universities fail to meet basic standards of usability as desired by the students. The findings also show that the usability evaluation score for each usability feature varies from country to country, such as for (1) multiple language support − 23% of the Canadian websites, 63% of the European websites and none of the USA websites has the feature; for (2) Scholarships/Funding/Financial Aid link − 24% of the Canadian websites, 80% of the European and the USA websites has the feature; for (3) admission link − 88% of the Canadian websites, 20% of the European websites and 90% of the USA websites has the feature. In addition, from the evaluative result we find that our proposed approach will not only increase the usability of academic websites but will also provide an easiest way to covert prospective student inquiries into enrollment opportunities.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Agarwal R, Venkatesh V (2002) Assessing a firm’s web presence: a heuristic evaluation procedure for the measurement of usability. Inf Syst Res 13(2):168–186
Allen R (2015) Defining Target audiences: who are we talking to, really? ePublish Media. http://meetcontent.com/blog/defining-target-audiences-who-are-we-talking-to-really/. Accessed 28 Aug 2017
Australia UoTS (2017) Learning futures. https://www.uts.edu.au/research-and-teaching/teaching-and-learning/learningfutures/overview. Accessed 02 Jan 2018
Bai B, Law R, Wen I (2008) The impact of website quality on customer satisfaction and purchase intentions: evidence from Chinese online visitors. Int J Hosp Manag 27(3):391–402
Booi VM, Ditsa GE (2014) Evaluation of South African Universities’ web portal interfaces using a triangulation of ubiquitous computing evaluation areas and technology acceptance model. In: Pelet J-E, Papadopoulou P (eds) User behavior in ubiquitous online environments. IGI Global, USA, pp 150–172
Bouramoul A (2016) Contextualisation of information retrieval process and document ranking task in web search tools. Int J Sp Based Situat Comput 6(2):74–89
Bove VM (2008) Handbook of usability testing: How to plan, design, and conduct effective tests. Wiley, Hoboken
Caglar E, Mentes SA (2012) The usability of university websites—a study on European University of Lefke. Int J Bus Inf Syst 11(1):22–40
Çerri S (2014) Electronic service quality in higher education: Evidence from Albania. EJSER. https://doi.org/10.26417/ejser.v2i1.p205-211
Chow AS, Bridges M, Commander P (2014) The website design and usability of US academic and public libraries. Ref User Serv Q 53(3):253–265
Çınar MO (2009) Eye tracking method to compare the usability of university web sites: a case study. In: International Conference on Human Centered Design. Springer, pp 671–678
Cox J, Dale B (2002) Key quality factors in Web site design and use: an examination. Int J Qual Reliabil Manag 19(7):862–888
Harrison R, Flood D, Duce D (2013) Usability of mobile applications: literature review and rationale for a new usability model. J Interact Sci 1(1):1
Hasan L (2012) Evaluating the usability of nine Jordanian university websites. In: Communications and Information Technology (ICCIT), 2012 International Conference on. IEEE, pp 91–96
Hasan L (2013) Determining the importance of design features on usable educational websites. In: IAENG transactions on engineering technologies. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 551–563
Higashino M, Hayakawa T, Takahashi K, Kawamura T, Sugahara K (2014) Management of streaming multimedia content using mobile agent technology on pure P2P-based distributed e-learning system. Int J Grid Util Comput 26 5(3):198–204
Hussain M, Al-Mourad MB (2016) A crowdsource model for quality assurance in cloud computing. Int J Grid Util Comput 7(3):177–183
Hussain W, Hussain OK, Hussain FK, Khan MQ (2017) Usability evaluation of english, local and plain languages to enhance on-screen text readability: a use case of Pakistan. Glob J Flex Syst Manag 18(1):33–49
Ismailova R, Kimsanova G (2016) Universities of the Kyrgyz Republic on the Web: accessibility and usability. Univ Access Inf Soc:1–9
Jabar M, Usman UA, Sidi F (2014) Usability evaluation of universities’ websites. Int J Inf Process Manag 5(1):10
Kaur S, Kaur K, Kaur P (2016) An empirical performance evaluation of universities website. Int J Comput Appl 146:15
Manzoor M, Hussain W (2012) A web usability evaluation model for higher education providing Universities of Asia. Sci Tech Dev 31(2):183–192
Manzoor M, Hussain W, Ahmed A, Iqbal MJ (2012) The importance of higher education website and its usability. Int J Basic Appl Sci 1(2):150–163
Mendes E, Mosley N, Counsell S (2006) The need for web engineering: an introduction. In: Mendes E, Mosley N (eds) Web Engineering. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, pp 1–27
Mentes SA, Turan AH (2012) Assessing the usability of university websites: an empirical study on Namik Kemal University. TOJET 11(3):61–69
Nielsen J (1993) Usability engineering. Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington
NIELSEN J (2012) Usability 101: introduction to usability. Useit.com. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-to-usability/. Accessed 12 June 2016
Noguchi H, Ohtaki Y, Kamada M (2016) A university information system made robust against natural disasters by taking advantage of remotely distributed campuses. Int J Sp Based Situat Comput 6(3):147–154
Rahman MS, Ahmed SZ (2013) Exploring the factors influencing the usability of academic websites: a case study in a university setting. Bus Inf Rev 30(1):40–47
Ranking TW (2016) World University Rankings 2016–2017. Elsevier. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/student/best-universities/best-universities-united-states. Accessed 10 Mar 2016
Rosenfeld L, Morville P (2002) Information architecture for the world wide web. O’Reilly Media, Inc., Newton
Roy S, Pattnaik PK, Mall R (2014) A quantitative approach to evaluate usability of academic websites based on human perception. Egypt Inf J 15(3):159–167
Roy S, Pattnaik PK, Mall R (2016) Quality assurance of academic websites using usability testing: an experimental study with AHP. Int J Syst Assur Eng Manag 8(1):1–11
Şengel E (2013) Usability level of a University Web Site. Procedia Soc Behav Sci 106:3246–3252
Şengel E, Öncü S (2010) Conducting preliminary steps to usability testing: investigating the website of Uludağ University. Procedia Soc Behav Sci 2(2):890–894
Stewart T (1998) Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs): Part 11: guidance on usability. International Organization for Standardization ISO 9241
Tsigereda M (2010) A framework for evaluating academic website’s quality from students’ perspective. MSc thesis, Department: Computer Science/Information Architecture, Delft University of technology
Zaphiris P, Kurniawan S (2007) Human computer interaction research in web design and evaluation. IGI Glob. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-59904-246-6
Zhou E, Okamoto S, Niibori M, Kamada M, Yonekura T (2015) IslayTouch: an educational visual programming environment based on state-transition diagrams that runs on android devices. In: Network-Based Information Systems (NBiS), 2015 18th International Conference on. IEEE, pp 238–241. I
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Manzoor, M., Hussain, W., Sohaib, O. et al. Methodological investigation for enhancing the usability of university websites. J Ambient Intell Human Comput 10, 531–549 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-018-0686-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-018-0686-6