Evaluation And Improvement On Web Usability

The Internet has been developed rapidly in the past few decades and various kinds of website emerge everyday. The Internet Economy has become the focus of the new economy. However,with the speedy development of websites,there are inevitably some problems in the construction of websites,such as users getting lost,difficult to find the intended information,garish page design,and complicated transaction processes etc,which make it difficult for people to use the websites. This is so called usability problem. Usability is the effectiveness,efficiency and satisfaction with which a specified set of users can achieve a specified set of tasks in a particular environment. Web usability is the effectiveness,efficiency and satisfaction with which the users use a website to achieve their goals. Along with the Internet immerging into people's lives in the last several ten years,web usability becomes an increasingly serious problem. The web usability study has become a hot point in the field of usability engineering. This thesis first describes the status of the web usability and the possible reasons,and then provides an extensive survey of the work in web usability. On this basis a framework for web usability is proposed. Then the thesis describes two experimental work that we conducted under the guidance of the framework. (1) A comparative website usability testing according to GIF standard was conducted to evaluate the usability of different websites. The results of the test reflect the real level of the website usability. This illuminates that GIF can be used as a means of objective uniform and quantitative measurement for web usability evaluation. (2) An improvement on web usability was made by applying the methods of card-sorting,web page editing and the accessibility enhancement and the improvement effect was evaluated. The evaluation results show that the web usability can be improved substantially by applying some simple usability engineering methods in many cases.