Technical and Perceived Usability Issues in Arabic Educational Websites

Abstract

Educational websites are often used as effective communication mediums to provide useful information for students and course instructors. The current study explores the perceived usability of three top-ranked Arabic educational websites across seven key usability components: effectiveness, efficiency, learnability, memorability, errors, satisfaction, and content. Moreover, the study also identifies the key technical and usability issues that currently exist within Arabic educational websites. A two-phase process encompassing automated tools and user testing was adopted to evaluate the technical performance and student acceptance of Arabic educational websites. In the automatic evaluation, two tools, namely, Web Page Analyser and GTMetrix, assessed the websites against a number of well-known performance guidelines and criteria. The student evaluation entailed 150 students completing three interaction tasks and evaluating the sites using the CSUQ questionnaire. The findings indicate that Arabic educational websites suffered from various technical issues, such as a high number of HTML objects and their large size and, consequently, slow loading speed. Moreover, the websites failed to satisfy all usability components, and students rated them negatively. Relevant guidelines for the effective design of Arabic educational websites are also discussed in this paper.

Older adults’ satisfaction with mHealth UI design-based culture: A case study of Jordan

“…As such, many previous studies have argued that the design of mobile UI needs to be engaging, meaningful, usable, easy to use and motivating (Kascak, Rébola, & Sanford, 2014), particularly for elderly users (Chadwick-Dias, McNulty, & Tullis, 2003;Franklin & Myneni, 2018). Studies on the relationship amongst UI components usability and Arabic culture are still in their early stages (Benaida, 2014). This study has attempted to show how usability is influenced by Arab culture and how UI design based-culture can be devised to help elderly Arab users use the interactive mHealth app UI efficiently.…”

Towards Usability Guidelines for the Design of Effective Arabic Websites

“…Some studies examined the performance of Arabic websites by inspecting the internal attributes of the HTML pages. For example, [25] compared three Arabic educational websites and reported technical issues related to the site loading speed as a direct consequence of the excessive number of HTML objects and images and their large size. Similarly, [26] inspected the number of HTML files, objects, images, CSS files, broken links and size of images on 9 websites using two specialized online tools.…”

“…fewer HTTP requests, compressed files…etc.). Author in [25] suggested that the site should take less than 3 seconds to load fully otherwise users might leave the site.…”

Evaluation of the Impact of Usability in Arabic University Websites: Comparison between Saudi Arabia and the UK

“…In this study, the author explores usability problems in the Arab North African educational websites, the satisfaction of Arabic users is still so far. The websites failed to satisfy all usability variables including slow loading speed and high number of HTML objects [24]. In addition, the level of usability in a non-Arabic country was investigated [3], [40] in Turkish universities, the users found the university websites easy to use and that the websites proved to be a very useful source of information regarding the university.…”