The usability concept re-considered : A need for new ways of measuring real web use
Charlotte Olsson · KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) · 2000
Usability is a common term used in discussions of WWW (World Wide Web). This is definitely important, as more and more web sites are frequently visited and many people claim the web as an important building block for the new economy or the network economy. However, the argument of this paper is that research so far have missed out important aspects of usability since their models for evaluation of web sites are based on traditionally usability concepts not optimized for web surfing but rather for measuring efficiency on tasks such as information search in traditional GUIs. This paper outline the framework used so far in research and practice to measure web usability and then, by illustrating how the "use" of the web sometimes is more then just information search it extends the traditional framework as a proposal for a more successful framework to measure real web usability. The paper concludes that there is a need to extend current frameworks for measuring web usability as well as it point out the importance of future research into the area of measuring how people actually are using web sites.