Usability Evaluation of Educational Websites: A case Study of University of Basrah Website
Abstract
Administers of Educational websites have to know the usability issues that might be found on their websites. They should be awareofthe potential weaknesses and what has to be improved, in order to enhance the user friendliness of these websitesand enable users to get full benefits of usable educational websites. Unfortunately, there is little independent assessment of websites’ usability especially Arabic academic websites.Therefore, this research aims to fill the lack of information on usability assessment of Arabic educational websitesand investigate the usability of an academic website. Specifically, it evaluates and identifies the usability problems in the University of Basrah, one of the largest and oldest universities in Iraq, using the heuristic evaluation method.
The evaluation process involved recruiting two usability experts to browse and examine all the website pages including the pages related to colleges and departments. Evaluators extracted the website’s usability issues and their comments were aggregated and analysed. The results found a total of 3,143 usability issues in the University of Basrah website. The identified usability problems were categorised into 25 specific type and into their location. The resultsshow that heuristic evaluation is an effective method to identify a large number of usability issues and provide sufficient details regarding specific types of usability issues.
Keywords- Educational websites; evaluation; heuristic evaluation; usability; University of Basrah.
