Usability evaluation of the top 10 Universities of Pakistan through Guideline Scoring

Abstract

- In this digital era, the website of a university is a doorway to its information and services. Users expect that a university website must be designed professionally with user-friendly interface, which help them to search, navigate and collect information effectively. In this paper, the usability evaluation of the websites of the universities of Pakistan is performed through guideline scoring. In doing so, literature has been reviewed and a set of 77 guidelines divided into 11 categories are developed. Further, these guidelines are then used to evaluate top 10 universities of Pakistan. Based on the results of this study, we provided the scores to the website designs. Through the scores, we identified the top 3 university website designs, and the top designs in the particular categories of guidelines as well. We also identified the common usability issues in the designs of the university websites of Pakistan. The results of this research will help academia, practitioners, website developers and usability specialists to understand the problems of existing websites, which in overall may help them to design more usable websites.