Evaluating Web Usability from the User's Perspective

Abstract

The presence of multiple websites offering similar services has changed the user outlook. The user now prefers to visit those sites, which are easy to use. Many different methods have been proposed to measure usability of a website. The quantitative methods focus on the performance measurement of the website whereas the qualitative methods estimate the user's opinion of a website. However none of these specify measurement of the human emotions; the emotional experiences of the user during the website visit. This emotional aspect plays a strong guiding force in the way a user uses the website. In this paper we propose a distinct measure, which combines the qualitative, quantitative factors referred in the literature with rarely mentioned factors such as trust and feature state. The measure thus obtained determines the usability of a website from the user view point .It can be employed to compare usability of different websites