A quantitative approach to usability evaluation of web sites

Abstract

Web usability arose as research field at the very beginning of the Internet era. The term "Internet" was formally defined in October 1995; nevertheless Nielsen wrote his first article on web usability in May 1995, and looking in the newsgroup archives at groups.google.com we can find a promotional message (http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=...) of a company, dated December 1995, offering consulting services on usability. The pace of evolution of the web is creating new challenges and 15 years after the first studies on web usability, the subject is still attracting heavy interest from researchers. In the recent years numerous authors (Shneiderman and Plaisant, 1998; Nielsen and Molich, 1990; Nielsen, 1994) have been working on developing heuristics to support human evaluation of web sites. This paper builds upon the existing theory to develop a quantitative approach to usability evaluation of web sites.