The Automation of a Heuristic Evaluation Method for Identifying Usability Issues in Websites

Abstract

The availability and usage of web content has increased considerably over the last few decades. With this increase, the need for developing methods for evaluating the website usability has also arisen, and several techniques to evaluate web usability were developed. Most of them are manual processes, which are proven to be tedious and time consuming. Subsequently, many software tools that support these methods have been developed, and efforts are still underway to enhance the simplicity and accuracy of such tools. The main work presented in this paper is a a software solution named as Electronic Validator. This tool was implemented with the aims of developing an effective and efficient usability evaluation method which does not need expertise of usability specialists for website evaluation. The top level design of the E-Validator software system consists of two modules. These are the user interface and the evaluation engine. The software takes web pages saved on disk as input, extracts its related CSS data files and converts these information into a composite data structure. This data structure is then analyzed by the evaluation engine, which then identifies usability problems in the web pages. These usability issues are inserted into a report, which is displayed