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Generating a Domain Specific Inspection Evaluation Method through an Adaptive Framework: A Comparative Study on Educational Websites
Roobaea S. AlRoobaea, Ali H. Al-Badi, Pam J. Mayhew
Pages - 88 - 116     |    Revised - 15-05-2013     |    Published - 30-06-2013
Volume - 4   Issue - 2    |    Publication Date - May / June 2013  Table of Contents
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KEYWORDS
Heuristic Evaluation (HE), User Testing (UT), Domain Specific Inspection (DSI), Adaptive Framework, Educational Domain
ABSTRACT
The growth of the Internet and related technologies has enabled the development of a new breed of dynamic websites and applications that are growing rapidly in use and that have had a great impact on many businesses. These websites need to be continuously evaluated and monitored to measure their efficiency and effectiveness, to assess user satisfaction, and ultimately to improve their quality. Nearly all the studies have used Heuristic Evaluation (HE) and User Testing (UT) methodologies, which have become the accepted methods for the usability evaluation of User Interface Design (UID); however, the former is general, and unlikely to encompass all usability attributes for all website domains. The latter is expensive, time consuming and misses consistency problems. To address this need, new evaluation method is developed using traditional evaluations (HE and UT) in novel ways.
The lack of a methodological framework that can be used to generate a domain-specific evaluation method, which can then be used to improve the usability assessment process for a product in any chosen domain, represents a missing area in usability testing. This paper proposes an adapting framework and evaluates it by generating an evaluation method for assessing and improving the usability of a product, called Domain Specific Inspection (DSI), and then analysing it empirically by applying it on the educational domain. Our experiments show that the adaptive framework is able to build a formative and summative evaluation method that provides optimal results with regard to the identification of comprehensive usability problem areas and relevant usability evaluation method (UEM) metrics, with minimum input in terms of the cost and time usually spent on employing UEMs.
CITED BY (8)  
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4 Roobaea AlRoobaea, Ali H. Al-Badi and Pam J. Mayhew (2013), " The Impact of the Combination between Task Designs and Think-Aloud Approaches on Website Evaluation” Journal of Software and Systems Development, Vol. 2013 (2013), Article ID 172572, DOI: 10.5171/2013. 172572
5 Roobaea AlRoobaea, Ali H. Al-Badi and Pam J. Mayhew, “Generating a Domain Specific Inspection Evaluation Method through an Adaptive Framework” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), 4(6), 2013.
6 Roobaea S. AlRoobaea, Ali H. Al-Badi and Pam J. Mayhew, “Generating an Educational Domain Checklist through an Adaptive Framework for Evaluating Educational Systems” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), 4(8), 2013.
7 Alroobaea, R. S., Al-Badi, A. H., & Mayhew, P. J. (2013, November). Generating a Domain Specific Checklist through an Adaptive Framework for Evaluating Social Networking Websites. In IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Special Issue on Extended Papers from Science and Information Conference (p. 25).
8 AlRoobaea, R., Al-Badi, A. H., & Mayhew, P. J. Research Article The Impact of the Combination between Task Designs and Think-Aloud Approaches on Website Evaluation.
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Miss Roobaea S. AlRoobaea
Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology Taif University, Saudi Arabia and School of Computing Sciences, UEA, Norwich, UK - United Kingdom
r.alrobaea@uea.ac.uk
Mr. Ali H. Al-Badi
Department of Information Systems, Sultan Qaboos University, Oman - Oman
Dr. Pam J. Mayhew
University of East Anglia - United Kingdom


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