A Tool for Assessing the Consistency of Websites

Usability is becoming an increasingly important design factor for web sites. However time and budget contstraints for web projects prevents the hiring of usability professionals to conduct tests that are costly and time consuming to perform. A number of automatic usability assessment tools have been developed most of which offer reports on a per-page basis. However, they fail to provide inter-page assessments to test, for example the consistency of the site. Consistency refers to the extent to which a set of pages share a common layout. This work presents CAT, a Consistency Analysis Tool that, besides providing static, page-based usability measures, strives to assess the consistency of a website using Java and XSLT. The tool is based on a consistency model which is updated every time a page has been processed. Consistency testing involves collating the page with this model, reporting mismatches with the consistency attributes and adapting the model as new features are encountered for the first time.