A Systematic Review on Usability Evaluation for University Websites

Abstract

Usability of websites has been studied severally in a general term in different sectors such as entertainment, social media and e-commerce. Higher education is a sector that needs more attention because Universities are very important in the society and their websites hold important information for prospective students, parents, faculty, students of the university and the public. Several literature reviews have been conducted on website usability evaluation, not many have focused on University website usability evaluation. Existing reviews of University website usability evaluation have based their review on certain aspect of usability evaluation such as the methods used. The objective of this study is to carry out a systematic literature review of recent studies in this area in order to provide insight for University website developer, usability researchers and higher academic institutions in all. This study focuses on researches conducted on University website usability evaluation from 2016 to 2021. Findings from this study include additional information different from existing literature review, such as, objectives of researches, common usability attributes used by usability researchers, methods of data collection and analysis, changes in data collection due to Covid-19 pandemic and the types of usability problems found. The commonly mentioned usability problems are problems related to interface design, content, navigation, performance and accessibility.