Usability Measurement Model (UMM): A New Model for Measuring Websites Usability
Esraa Shawgi, A. Noureldien · International Journal of Information Science · 2015
Usability is commonly recognized as one of the most important quality factors of information systems. Different usability models for traditional information systems have been proposed. The current movement towards web-based information systems (WBIS) necessitates the need for special usability models for these systems. Accordingly questions such as how to measure the usability of WBIS and what to be considered during the development of websites to attain a high usability are raised. As a result, modeling usability of WBIS becomes an active researches filed and a new usability models for WBIS have been proposed. The goal of this paper is to develop a conceptual robust model that measure usability of WBIS. To achieve this goal we use an analytical methodology to analyze existing usability models to investigate their interrelationships, strength, and weaknesses. As a result, our developed model, the Usability Measurement Model (UMM), is built on the advantages and strength of usability models; ISO-9126-1 software quality standard, McCall model, website QEM model and 2QCV3Q model. We define the high-level usability factors in the new usability model as; accessibility, understandability, learnability, operability, attractiveness, and navigability, which are all defined in previous models, but not in one model. The new model defines a set of new sub factors; findability, clear labeling links, languages support, guidelines, help documents, descriptive comments, page load time, clear fonts, consistency, relevant graphics, good alignment of page elements, menu bar, link to home, use of frames, and search engine. To test the applicability and output of the UMM, we use the model in measuring usability of websites of three Sudanese universities. The attained results show that UMM is a promising, highly efficient usability model.