Web-usability Assessment Methodology

It has always been a challenging undertake to build a user friendly website and make it a useful resource for the audiences. User satisfaction is related to usability of a product. Here with this paper my effort is to develop a methodology in order to provide a recommendation and guidelines of whether a website meets usability requirement or not. The methodology aims towards an assessment of a website and prescribe a remedial to achieve more usability. I have developed a simple excel spreadsheet to demonstrate the methodology that I have developed. In order to prove the concept and the methodology, I have considered a website as a case. How to apply the methodology on the case website has been explained and the case website has been assessed applying the proposed methodology. In order to assess the website, at first stage, usability factors have been identified. The usability factors are the key components of the assessment process. During the assessment process, based on the websites usability quality and availability, every usability factor gets a weight. The total value (the sum) of all the weights is the usability value of the website. At the final stage of the assessment process the study shows total usability value of the case website. This paper will also explain and describe what usability means to the web users and why it is very essential to focus on usability perspective of a website. Comparision study between websites and remedial guidelines are not in the scope of this paper though the original research work includes both of thsese area based on the Assessment Methodology. This paper merely focusses to the fundamental research of developing a ‘Assesment Methodology’.