Context-Driven Assessment of Commercial Web Sites

Companies seeking to achieve significant benefits through e-business need to create an effective and usable web presence to ensure successful interaction and communication with their employee, partners and customers. Despite the wealth of information available on web ease-of-use or usability, there is no standard, allencompassing framework defining web site effectiveness. Hence it is difficult to measure usability from a qualitative and especially quantitative perspective. In this paper, we examine various approaches to assessing Web site effectiveness and usability, and then present a three-dimensional approach that takes into account the context of the site and its functionality within that context.