Experience With Usability Testing of Web Portals

Abstract

The paper reports on the experience regarding usability evaluation of broad-reach web portals. The designed methodology advocates a number of usability test methods along with specialists' inspection and provides a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative assessment feedback. Our experience accords with the claim that we should not rely on isolated evaluations, but instead on combine assessment methods. In this paper we present and discuss mainly the results obtained through user-based usability evaluation. The results indicate that chosen research instruments, measures and methods for usability testing were consistent. Conversely, the results of the designed guideline inspection did not conform to the ones obtained through the end user testing. Although proved promising, some of the guideline-based evaluation aspects need improvement.