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Usability evaluation of a website is a key element in identifying the areas where the end-users might experience problems while interacting with it. The usability parameter has a great impact on the performance of a website, an organization's image, user satisfaction, and their intention to revisit the site. In the recent past, there has been a tremendous increase in the use of websites for seeking requisite information about admission to various courses offered by higher education institutions. There has been a lack of an effective and efficient set of heuristics that can be used to evaluate the usability of these education institution websites. The present study differs from earlier studies by providing a new set of 43 usability heuristics and categorizing them into eight distinct factors on the basis of their empirical validation. These eight identified factors exhibit strong psychometric properties and are ease of navigation, design quality, information architecture, credibility, functionality quality, content quality, simplicity, and learnability. The findings of this study are highly useful for the website designers and evaluators of higher education institutions' websites, who are concerned with evaluating and improving the usability of these websites. The findings of this study have theoretical as well as practical implications.

A well-planned information architecture (IA) of a website can enhance the end users' efficiency, learnability, controllability and intention to revisit the site. Its significance is even more in the context of academic websites where the generation, management, and distribution of information are among the major activities. However, it remains a neglected issue as designers of academic websites have overlooked the important aspect of ‘intuitive user navigation' and focused primarily on its ‘look and feel.' Thus, the current study aims to analyze and compare the effectiveness of information architectural designs of some randomly selected university websites of Punjab (India) through a usability testing technique. For this purpose, the performance metric measured was the information seeking time. The usability session of each subject was captured through Camtasia Studio software. The findings of this study highlight the shortcomings of presently designed academic websites which adversely affect the usability of a website.

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