An Approach for Assessing the Usability of Academic Websites: An Application to Websites’ Universities

Websites became closely ingrained in our personal life and work styles, and they have already become crucial to the success of the business. The web development process is often ad-hoc and chaotic, lacking systematic and disciplined approaches and quality assurance and control procedures. To attain the desired quality of websites, a lot of quality factors should be considered. Web quality factors can be organized around three perspectives: visitor, owner, and developer. Each perspective is mainly interested in some quality factors than others. The visitor is mainly concerned with seven quality factors: usability, accessibility, content quality, credibility, functionality, security, and internationalization. This paper focuses on usability as an example of quality considerations that are more important from the visitor’s perspective. Therefore, this paper aims to propose an approach for enhancing the usability of websites. The proposed approach depends on a set of quality guidelines for three quality sub-factors of usability, which are: navigability, searching, and legibility. Finally, a case study is used to evaluate and illustrate the validity of the proposed approach. The outcomes are explained and interpreted.