On The Usability Evaluation Of University Portal

With the rapid development of the Internet,people can use more tools to search for information and e-commerce activities.At present,since usability is an important part of assessing the success of a web site,the research of website usability has been obviously increased.University portal not only serves as a platform for the educational institution to interact with its visitors,but also helps to build visualize.Review of the current situation of the research on the usability of the portal website in universities,two characteristics can be found.Firstly,it has been widely recognized by people that the usability of portal website of the university education is very important,while very few studies were found in the literature that evaluated the usability of university portal.Secondly,the studies that were found emphasized the importance of usability in the design of educational websites,which also provided an outline of the important design features that need to be included in the design of educational websites.However,these studies did not investigate,and then consider the relative importance of the design features on the usability of universities portal from the viewpoint of students.In consideration of the above problems,this paper designs two experiments to further explore the usability of the portal websites in universities.In experiment 1,from perspective of uses,we explored the relative weight of usability criterion in university portal through inquiry technology.The results showed that content and navigation were the first and second preferred design categories to be most important while evaluating the usability of university portal.Furthermore,taking three Universities in Zhejiang as an example,we compared the differences on each criterion.The results show that there are significant differences in the effective internal search tools,friendly interface,appropriate use of color,proper use of fonts and appropriate page design.Through the panel discussions,we summed up user recommendations for optimizing each measured sites.In general,the results showed the majority of the students were satisfied with the usability of the three universities.Specifically,students were almost satisfied with the content and navigation of the test websites,but dissatisfied with the design of the websites.In experiment 2,we used usability test to assess the usability of three university portal.And the WAMMI scale scores of the three universities are collected In the second phase.The results showed that the difference in the number of clicks,path length and time of complete the tasks are significant among three universities.Overall,Wenzhou University's performance is better than the other two universities.The difference of the scores of the WAMMI scale is also significant.Different from usability test results,difference between Zhejiang University and Wenzhou University is not obvious.Comparatively speaking,Ningbo University scored lower in all dimensions and needs to be improved in the future.