Abstract:
There has been a growing tendency towards greater usage of websites over the
last few decades. This has resulted in a need to ensure better usability of these
web sites. However, as some of the usability tests on web sites were either
technology dependent, such as conformity to a particular web standard or
application dependent, such as web sites built for news organizations, it was
difficult to conduct a more general form of usability tests on websites. As a
solution to this problem, researchers have developed various algorithms for
assessing usability of websites in a more generic manner. However, as these
evaluation schemes required the manual application of such algorithms, this
exercise has turned out to be a tedious and time consuming task.
The research presented in this thesis had been conducted to develop an automated
solution for the evaluation of usability of websites. It is hypothesized that
automation of heuristic evaluation of web sites can be done by web page parsing
with CssParser and Jsoup libraries. The solution takes web pages and CSS files
saved on disk as inputs and produces a report of usability issues as the output.
Once the input set of web pages is provided, the automated solution developed in
this research extracts certain attribute values from the saved CSS files and checks
them against a set of predefined values. Based on the results, the usability
problems are identified, and displayed as a report. The system developed is
intended to be used by user interface designers, during the software interface
design phase.
By using the web site usability solution developed in this research, web designers
will be able to improve their designs after identifying die usability problems in
user interfaces. The overall design of the solution include three modules, namely
v
the user interface module, evaluation engine module and a database of evaluation
parameters. These modules were developed using the Java language and the
overall system has been implemented to work in a platform independent manner.
The proof-of-concept of the automated solution for web site usability evaluation
has been tested by considering 8 sample websites. The evaluation results shows
that the developed scheme can evaluate the websites with an average accuracy of
67% while taking less than 30 seconds for evaluation. This clearly shows the
utility of the developed system as an initial filter to identify web site designs with
significant problems in their usability.
