Preliminary investigation of Islamic websites design & content feature: A heuristic evaluation from user perspective

Abstract

This paper investigates the quality ranking of current Islamic websites using nine (9) website features (i.e. navigation, interactivity, legitimacy, objectivity, authority, relevancy, attractiveness, credibility, and reliability) in order to find the highest and lowest quality scores for individual websites based on their design & content feature. A heuristic evaluation method using single-user approach was used to evaluate 50 selected Islamic websites. Google search was used to select the 50 topmost popular Islamic websites on 8th December, 2009. The findings indicate that there has been a considerable improvement in the quality of Islamic websites in terms of design and information content. The findings also show that none of the websites evaluated displayed biased contents against Islam or Islamic groups. In addition, the findings reveal that websites with the highest quality scores were rated excellent in terms of information legitimacy and objectivity, whereas those with the least quality scores were rated poor in terms of authority and interactivity features. The paper concludes that there are considerable quality variations between Islamic websites with highest and lowest percentage scores.