An analytic hierarchy process model for evaluating and comparing website usability
Adrien R. Presley, Paul Fellows · International Journal of Business Information Systems · 2013
User acceptance of websites is a critical success factor for e-commerce firms. Usability has long been recognised as a major factor in the acceptance of websites but has been problematic in terms of formal analysis. This paper presents a usability analysis model based on the Microsoft usability guidelines (MUG). The model employs the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), a decision-making methodology that allows importance ranking to be determined and alternatives compared based on a set of multi-level criteria. AHP decomposes complex decisions into a hierarchy consisting of increasingly more detailed but easily comprehended sub-problems. The MUG provides a conceptualisation of usability based on five high-level criteria that are then broken down into 14 sub-criteria. It is proposed that the MUG naturally presents a hierarchy for system evaluation that can be structured and analysed using the AHP. This paper presents a model and demonstrates its use by comparing three financial information portals.