Domain and culture-specific heuristic evaluation of the websites of universities of Pakistan

Abstract

In this digital era, the website of a university is a doorway to its information and services. These websites reflect the actual university where the prospective students make plans to get admission, current students perform interaction daily, and other stakeholders also access it to get the required information. These users expect university websites to be designed professionally, in an organized manner, with a user-friendly interface, which helps them to search, navigate, and collect information effectively. Users pose cultural norms in their life unintentionally, which makes them expect the same preferences in their routine dealings. These preferences reflect a specific culture where the user resides and a specific domain where an application is being used. The heuristic evaluation methodology is widely applied for usability evaluation. It is an inspection-based, fast, and inexpensive approach for identifying usability problems in a system. These heuristics are well designed to pinpoint the general usability design faults however, they limit detecting potential domain and culture-specific usability problems. In this regard, the usability evaluation of the top ten universities of Pakistan is performed in this research using domain and culture-specific heuristic evaluation. The results of the evaluation are discussed that recognize the potential usability issues in the website design of the universities of Pakistan.