Evaluation of Web Portals

Abstract

Evaluation of Web portals is an important issue in Web engineering, taking into consideration the Internet explosion and the exponential growth of Web sites and online information sources. Web portals present nowadays a significant variety of features, complexity of structure, and plurality of offered services. It is therefore important to adopt evaluation frameworks that go beyond the simple assessment of the different operational aspects of Web portals, and that address issues such as quality monitoring and analysis of the assessment results, in the direction of interpreting the factors that affect users’ satisfaction. Moreover, there is also a need for supportive evaluation methodologies that can integrate the results of the assessment of every portal aspect being evaluated, and provide measurable, synthesized results to the key decision makers (being either those financially supporting the service or those involved in the design, development, operation, and/or exploitation of the service) aiming to facilitate the improvement of the offered services. In general, a Web portal offers a variety of services in a continuing development and therefore, it is desired to adopt an evaluation methodology that allows for monitoring the progress of performance over time, and identifying weak aspects that could be enhanced along with strong aspects that could be taken advantage of. Hence, a challenging objective in the evaluation process of a Web portal is setting up an assessment methodology that allows the calculation of a set of monitorable quality performance indicators to be defined, and provides the key decision makers with a dynamic, flexible, and scalable framework for their analysis. The main objective of this article is to study the issues previously introduced by adopting a quality-oriented approach in Web portals evaluation. Such an approach considers the Web portal as the product and the user as the customer of the Web portal services and focuses on the analysis and assessment of the multiple Web portal features that affect the overall user’s satisfaction, whereas it allows contextualization both in terms of services in use and in terms of user group categorization. Background