Automated usability evaluation on university websites using data mining methods

Abstract EN

There are increasing interests in designing and developing effective and usable websites to deliver high degree of quality.

A university website is important to its users since it delivers to them information and services such as courses and programs, delivering online learning facilities and online registrations.

Despite the fact that many academic websites do not satisfy their users’ needs, the institutions’ dependence on using these websites for a wide variety of tasks is increasing. In this paper, we propose an approach to automate usability evaluations of university websites by using data mining method. We conducted two experiments to evaluate University website.

We first used a questionnaire directed towards students using the website to examine use of color, display space, scroll left and right, …etc.

And then we used automatic tools to measure task scenario of the website attributes which cannot be perceived by students such as task time, number of clicks and number of pages, …etc.

We carried out our research on Alazhar University-Gaza. Our approach is implemented using data mining tool and exploits association rules to evaluate usability on university website.

The results show that the proposed approach generated strong rules of automatic evaluation; finally we give some useful recommendations for the university.