Automated usability testing: Analysing asia web sites

Abstract

Web usability is continuing to be a pressing problem. For number of years researchers have been developed tools for doing automatic web usability testing. This study uses our own PHP, and MySQL based tool AWebHUT: Automated Web Homepage Usability Tester to evaluate web usability of full Dmoz (www.dmoz.org) Asia web sites (45126 on time stamp 2011-12-03 04:12:46 GMT). The tool uses an extensive automated quantitative analysis of XHTML source code of homepages against seventeen organised web usability guidelines. The automated quantitative approach is effective on large scale to achieve better usability. The AWebHUT uses four web usability levels such as N: Neutral, V: Violate, R: Respect, and E: Error to evaluate web usability. The main objective of the study is to produce data which is used to answer research questions, (1) Are there any categories of web sites which have usability problems? Which ones? and (2) Are there any categories in which the usability is typically higher? Why? The findings were indicated that all Asia categories have usability problems. Furthermore, there are four web sites which have highest web usability problem with violation percentage 71. One step further, the Asia category: Weather has highest usability problems with 42.2819 as the average of the violation percentage. The category Weather uses tables and images, considerable amount of those were not satisfying web usability guidelines which relates to tables and images. One step further, the Asia wants to get the same level of usability as North America, Europe, and Australia therefore it is essential to have an automated web usability evaluation in Asia web sites to identify web usability problems which are important for improving Asia web sites.