Qualitative usability feature selection with ranking: a novel approach for ranking the identified usability problematic attributes for academic websites using data-mining techniques

Abstract

Abstract Objective The aim of this study is to identify common usability problematic patterns that belong to top-50 academic websites as a whole and then ranking of these identified usability problems is also provided. Methods In this study, a novel approach is proposed that is based upon the integration of conventional usability testing and heuristic evaluation with data-mining knowledge discovery process. An experiment is conducted to evaluate ISO 9241-151 guidelines under 16-different categories by hundred participants who are frequent users of academic websites. After evaluation, the qualitative usability data is collected and different data-mining techniques i.e. association rule and decision tree are applied to recognize fully functional and problematic usability attributes. Identified problematic attributes represent common usability problems patterns related to academic websites from the qualitative viewpoint only. This study further prioritizes these problematic attributes by using the ranking algorithm that represents the order in which usability issues must be resolved. Results In this study, 16-different categories are considered for usability evaluation of academic websites. The results show that no issues are identified in two-categories i.e. {Headings_Titles_Labels and The Home_Page}. In Scrolling and Paging category, horizontal scrolling is identified as a major issue whereas, in Internationalization category, the users do not identify supported languages on most of the academic websites. Users do not find websites to be highly secured under Security category. Our findings investigate that most of the issues are found in Search and Social Media categories. Furthermore, users easily locate 50.53% guidelines on websites as fully functional whereas, 49.46% of characteristics are considered as problematic usability features that are not functional on the academic website as a whole. Conclusions Identification of common usability problems at an early stage can lower substantially the development efforts in cost and time. Software developers can restrain from these potential usability problems during the development of novel systems under the same context. Providing appropriate solutions for these problems can become valuable in software development. The proposed approach concludes that conventional usability evaluation methods can go beyond just than testing of systems. The study is a milestone towards identification and prioritizing problematic usability features for academic websites and helps in providing the wholistic approach of usability problematic patterns for web-domain.