Evaluating the usability of web pages: a case study

Abstract

An evaluation of the Utrecht University website was carried out with 240 students. New criteria were drawn from the literature and operationalized for the study. These criteria are surveyability and findability. Web pages can be said to satisfy a usability criterion if their efficiency and effectiveness is satisfactory to the user. We operationalized efficiency and effectiveness as surveyability, that is, the users' satisfaction with the legibility and comprehensibility of the pages and findability, the users' ability to find information on the pages or the pages' ease of use, respectively. We conducted a case study in which subjects were observed while they performed a search task on the Internet and then answered questions about findability and surveyability. The surveyability and findability criteria seem to be an effective measure of the usability of web pages and give a reliable indication of the users' judgements of the pages' user-friendliness.