Usability Evaluation of the Top 10 Universities in Iraq Using Heuristic Methods

A heuristic evaluation ‎ model is proposed for assessing the usability of the Top 10 Iraq university websites. ‎This model is based on 3 hierarchies of website usability criteria levels. The top hierarchy level consists of five website categories: design and layout, learnability, content, performance, and errors. In the middle hierarchy level 18 subcategories, and in the bottom hierarchy level 44 elements were described. The evaluation model utilized both automated tools and observation methods. To validate the results obtained by the proposed model, the selected universities were evaluated and scored according to the usability criteria of their websites. Besides the observation elements, the four automated tools (thinkwithgoogle, gtmetrix, tools. Pingdom, and webpagetest) were also used to assess the error and performance of the websites. The study showed that except for the University of Kufa and Baghdad University websites, the rest of the university websites failed to meet the applied website usability criteria levels of the proposed evaluation model.