Usability Analysis of University Websites in Pakistan

Abstract

Usability analysis of a website determines how easy it is for the user to navigate between the pages, find information of interest, and his overall experience of the usage. Good website design is focused on the user experience. Usability is one of the major factors deciding the product's value. It can decide what value the product holds for its user hence the importance of website usability cannot be ignored. In this research, we have used different, manual, and automated heuristic evaluation methods to determine the usability of different Pakistani University websites. Our main goal is to provide some insight on the usability of these University websites as no such work has been done in the past on this. We evaluate a system based on heuristic evaluation and usability standards to measure its score. We also conducted an online survey on University students to get their feedback on their University website. We concluded that the user experience of most of the University websites in Pakistan fails from the usability perspective and students usually have to face a hard time finding the relevantinformation.