A Framework for Generating Domain-Specific Heuristics for Evaluating Online Educational Websites

Abstract

Websites are growing in use worldwide but need to bcontinuously evaluated and monitored to measure their efficiency, effectiveness and user sa tisfaction, and ultimately to improve quality. For this purpose, heuristic evaluation methodologies, such as Nielsen 's Heuristics, have become the accepted means for t he usability evaluation of user interface designs; how ever, they are general, and unlikely to encompass a ll usability attributes for all website domains. The aim of this paper is to enhance one of the most-used usability evaluation methods by generating specific heuristics for the e ducational domain, and then to compare and contrast them against Nielsen's ten heuristics (as first validation stage for proposed framework) in terms of the nu mber and severity of problems found, and of a number of usab ility measurements. The result show that the propos ed framework succeeded in building a new set of heuris tics for online educational websites, which managed to discover uniquely 55 (69%) of the usability problem s in all chosen websites (80 problems in total), in comparison with Nielsen's heuristics, which discove red only 6 (8%). 19 problems (24%) were commonly discovered (overlapping or sharing) by both sets of heuristics. The time taken using Nielsen's heurist ics was less than the time taken using the newly developed Educa tional Heuristics but this is because Nielsen's heu ristics do not cover all the issues related to educational web sites. It appears that the framework for generating context- specific heuristics did in fact produce an efficaci ous set of Educational Heuristics that covered the issues well in this domain.