Usability Design Study of University Website: A Case of Normal University in China

Abstract

With the development of network technology, the university website has become an important online platform for the university. In terms of university website, the usability of the website affects the user experience and efficiency of teachers and students greatly. Although the importance of usability is gradually valued, the usability of university website is still criticized by many people, and even seriously affects the online service of university teaching. There are few studies looking into the problem. This paper takes a university website, i.e. South China Normal University, as an example, sets 3 typical scenarios from different groups of students, such as preschool student, current student and alumni, tests the usability of the website through experiments and uses eye tracker to track users’ eye movements, observes users’ behavior, collects users’ opinions, and puts forward some improvement suggestions. The research finds that, the university website developer should consider the users’ previous school website using habits and take advantage of the “habitually obvious”, and try to develop a ordered and normal structure for the university website, which considering the identity of the users and sort the functions in groups of characters. These results provide ideas for improving the usability design of the university website by taking the South China Normal University for instance.