International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET)
e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 09 Issue: 05 | May 2022
p-ISSN: 2395-0072
www.irjet.net
Heuristic Usability Evaluation of Websites Karthik R1, Vaishnavi M2 1B.E
Student Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Bannari Amman Institute of Technology Professor Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Bannari Amman Institute of Technology ---------------------------------------------------------------------***--------------------------------------------------------------------2. Literature Review Abstract - As the digital transformation grows at a rapid 2Assistant
pace, more and more companies are embracing digital technology and getting accustomed to the new digital landscape. Under this circumstance manufacturing companies should try to expand their services to offer their customers a digital buying experience. As website evaluation tools have started infiltrating the market, the effectiveness of the tools has not reached the levels of pinpointing the usability issues within a website. This paper evaluates the usability of the Spac website as a case study by benchmarking against Spac’s top two competitors Competitor 1[C1] and Competitor 2[C2] based on Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics[12]. The analysis indicates that the website consists of some usability problems in seven heuristics such as lack of advanced searching for power users, improving existing error prevention mechanism, inability to inform users the waiting time, information not provided in a logical manner, some problems in producing consistent layout, lack of emergency exits within web pages and unsupportive error messages.
Key Words: Usability, Benchmarking,
2.1 Websites and Design The rapid growth of the internet has drastically changed the way how people communicate, behave, share and acquire information. Communicating via the internet has become more efficient, convenient and inexpensive. The results from several research suggests that a website’s aesthetic, functional and symbolic attributes have a positive impact on the intent to use the website and also influences to have a positive word of mouth[1]. Visual appeal is an important factor for website user experience[2]. Companies which design with focus on trust have a competitive edge over competitors. The website design has a powerful impact on building user’s trust over a website and especially the visual aspect plays a big role in capturing a user's first impression[3]. Design thinking is an effective way for designing websites, especially it is highly effective in revealing pain points and arriving at innovative solutions to address those problems[4]. Websites have become the center of communication for almost all businesses with usability being the main factor influencing customer behavior[5]. Purchasing of 2D websites is dramatically increasing and will surpass the brick-and-mortar shops in a few years. Though there is a steep increase in 2D websites, physical shops still have advantages which the websites find it hard to replicate[6].
Heuristic
evaluation
1. INTRODUCTION As all industries present in all sectors are digitizing their infrastructure, automated systems are introduced into the workforce, the need to showcase their range of products and services has emerged in order to grab the attention of customers. The website is the best place to build the customer’s trust and loyalty. The online presence is an effective way to increase the organization’s credibility and establish the brand. Spac, a starch manufacturer, has started its digital transformation journey in 2018 and has a vision of automating most of its machinery by 2025. As part of its digital transformation Spac has a website featuring its product offerings. According to Spac’s monthly website visitors statistics there were relatively few enquiries from their main website when compared to the ecommerce websites Spac has subscribed to. In order to understand the root cause of the problem this study is developed to evaluate the usability of the Spac website by benchmarking against two other competitors, based on the ten usability heuristics developed by Nielsen[12]. Based on those, further recommendations are provided to improve their website.
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2.2 Usability, Tools & Benchmarking Usability is a very important aspect of user experience these days as it is linked to the satisfaction of the users. According to [8] usability is the extent to which a system can be used by users to achieve their goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction within a framework. Jakob Nielsen says that “learnability”, “efficiency”, “memorability”, “errors” and “satisfaction” as the five attributes the user interface of the system should contain[9,10]. A lot of website evaluation tools are in existence but their effectiveness is questionable. The study conducted by [7] revealed that the tools inspected a lot of aspects including SEO, security, page size, accessibility and performance and further analysis showed that usability was ignored, contradictory scores by different tools over the same website, vague results and overlooking usability issues. Very
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