Developing Usability Tools and Techniques for Designing and Testing Web Sites

Published

June 1, 1998

Author(s)

Jean C. Scholtz, Sharon J. Laskowski, L L. Downey

Abstract

Web sites are developed by a wide variety of companies from small one or two person operations to large corportions with entire teams and departments devoted to web development work. Many of the smaller companies have no usability professionals to help with the design of their sites; many of the companies don't even realize they should have usability professionals assess their sites Often, budget constraints prohibit hiring a usability professional. Furthermore, the time line for development may not allow for usability testing and iterative design.Traditional usability methods are expensive, time consuming, and many require professional usability engineers. The environment in which Web sites are designed cannot easily support these constraints. Our approach assumes that evaluation of Web sites must be rapid, remote, and as automated as possible. In this paper, we ll discuss three tools and two techniques that we have developed to facilitate quick evaluation. These tools and techniques can be found at http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/~wcbmct/. We'll also describe supporting case studies and our plans for future tools and techniques.

Proceedings Title

4th Conference on Human Factors and the Web

Conference Dates

June 5-6, 1998

Conference Title

Human Factors in the Web Conference

Pub Type

Conferences

Keywords

remote usability testing, usability testing, web development, web sight evaluation, web site design

Citation

Scholtz, J. , Laskowski, S. and Downey, L. (1998), Developing Usability Tools and Techniques for Designing and Testing Web Sites, 4th Conference on Human Factors and the Web (Accessed October 15, 2024)