Analyzing compliance and application of usability guidelines and recommendations by web developers

Abstract

There are many guidelines and recommendations for improving the user experience in websites. Web developers can follow these recommendations to improve the usability of the website and the user experience. Although guidelines and recommendations could not be the final solution to get the optimum usability level, they are useful and fast to apply, in comparison to other kind of usability improvements may involve many time and resources. Currently we can find many websites which contain big usability problems, some of these problems could be solved applying usability guidelines and recommendations. In this research work we analyse the degree of compliance of usability recommendations by web developers. We did an extensive compilation of usability recommendations designed to focus the user attention in the important parts of the website and reduce noise generated by unimportant parts. We analyse the behaviour of 20 web developers to obtain the degree of application of usability recommendations, before they received a specific course on usability, and after it. The purpose of the research is to analyse the degree of compliance with the usability recommendations focused on reducing noise. The two main objectives are (1) Determine which recommendations are the most forgotten by web developers without training in usability. (2) Determine which recommendations are most important according to web developers’ thinking. In the conclusions we determine which are the most important recommendations. What are the most applied recommendations and their degree of compliance. Reflections are also extracted about the relationship of the results obtained.