Measuring Website Usability of Chinese Enterprise with a Heuristic Procedure

Abstract

With the proliferation of the Internet, Chinese enterprises are all adopting technologies to build their Web sites. In this paper, the purpose is to measure the usability of these B2C e-commerce Web site. Five B2C e-commerce Web sites in China are evaluated, based on a comprehensive set of usability guidelines developed by Microsoft. The weights of each category and subcategory are assessed first by 350 users who are asked to assume the role of consumers. Then the usability grades of each category to each of the five chosen Web sites are rated. The conclusions under the statistic data analysis not only touch upon the rating of Web sites, but also highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each Web site. The evaluation of consumers with respect to the categories has also been included and some interesting finds are offered for researchers, Web site designers, and e-commerce users.