A Study Of The Usability Of University Portal In Jiangsu Province In The Context Of The Belt And Road Initiative

With the deepening of international cooperation between China and foreign countries in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative,the number of international students in China has sharply increased in recent years.University portal has become an important platform providing required services for these international students.How to enhance the quality of its services and prevent usability problems caused by both verbal and non-verbal design have become a great concern for universities.Usability refers to the extent to which a system can be used to achieve specific goals with effectiveness,efficiency and satisfaction.Previous studies have employed various methods to evaluate the usability from various perspectives.However,due to different participants,instruments and designs,scholars have not reached an agreement on influencing factors and measurements of usability and to what extent they influence usability.Moreover,few studies on the usability of university portal have been conducted with international students as target users,especially with the focus on how English is used on university websites,which may affect their usability levels.To fill this research gap,with international students as target users,this study evaluated the usability of university portal in Jiangsu Province by answering the following questions:(1)What is the usability level of university portal from the perspectives of attractiveness,controllability,helpfulness,efficiency,and learnability?(2)What are the main causes of the usability level of university portal?78 international students from a leading university in Jiangsu Province participated in this study,who all came from countries involved in the Belt and Road Initiative.Target users’ attitudes towards attractiveness,controllability,helpfulness,efficiency and learnability were evaluated by conducting WAMMI(Website Analysis and Measurement Inventory)questionnaire.Meanwhile,interview was adopted to reveal the causes of relevant results.The results showed that:(1)Target users held a negative attitude towards the usability of university portal.Controllability and helpfulness were the least satisfying factors in terms of the usability of this website;(2)The main causes of users’ negative attitudes towards the usability were problems in navigation,design,content and language.The linguistic features of university portal had great impact on the usability of university portal,which showed that inconsistent use of terminology and inconsistency in the language of the interface lead to a lower satisfaction of university portal website.Based on the results mentioned above,relevant implications of the present study can be concluded.First of all,the influencing factors adopted in the present study can provide a new perspective for future studies and can be applied to evaluate other websites.Then,it is necessary for website developers to consider the needs and expectations of target users.It is expected that this study will shed some light on how to improve the quality of university portal in the future.