Usability Guidelines

This section will investigate the current usability guidelines for e-learning websites in the English language; this will provide a clear answer to one of the objectives of this thesis at the end of this section. Overall, there are three sources for usability guidelines that currently lead in the sector of usability. These are discussed below.

2.4.11.1 International Standard ISO 9241-151

The International Organization for Standardisation (ISO) is a non-governmental organization founded in Geneva that works to improve technical standards for products and services sold. International Standard ISO 9241-151 is divided into a main part (9241) and a subpart (151). The main part comes under the name of ‘Ergonomics of human system interaction’. This standard has an essential role in the world of usability. Subpart 151 is part of ISO 9241 and is found under the name‘Guidance on World Wide Web user interfaces’. ISO 9241-151 concentrates on the following areas: high-level

design decisions and design strategy, content design, navigation and search, and content presentation (Del Valle et al., 2010).

The aim of ISO 9241-151 is to create guidance for those considering WWW user interfaces and to improve usability. This document provides terms and definitions for users to allow them to understand the guidelines; for example: the interaction object component of the web user interface accepts user input (links, buttons, input fields, check boxes, selection lists). Another example: a splash screen temporary page is shown prior to the homepage when a website is first accessed. The document also describes the differences between three important features: process, design and evaluation aspects and additionally describes how to combine them together to create human-centred web user interfaces.

2.4.11.2 Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines

The National Cancer Institute in the U.S.A (which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services HHS) has developed guidelines under the name of ‘Research- Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines’ to help designers, website managers, website maintainers, usability specialists, researchers and students.

These guidelines are a result from the efforts of expert designers and researchers who analysed more than 400 websites (Leavitt & Shneiderman, 2007). Around 13 usability professionals rated each guideline using a 5 point Likert-like scale to express their degree of agreement or disagreement. Web designers can evaluate their websites using these guidelines. The Guidelines Handbook in its latest version (2006) contains a total of 209 guidelines, 22 more guidelines than the previous version (2004). The guidelines’

 Design Process and Evaluation.

 Optimizing the User Experience.

 Accessibility.

 Hardware and Software.

 The Homepage.

 Page Layout.

 Navigation.

 Scrolling and Paging.

 Links. Text Appearance.

 Lists. Screen-Based Controls.

 Graphics, Images and Multimedia.

 Writing Web Content.

 Content Organization.

 Search.

 Usability Testing.

Each chapter includes a number of guidelines. Every guideline is defined and provides explanations alongside its source and the importance rating given to it by experts and researchers. The following table (2.3) shows the guideline, comments, sources, strength of evidence and relative importance.

Table 2-3: Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines

Guideline Comments Sources Stre

ngth of evide nce Relati ve impor tance Chapter one (Provide Useful Content)

Provide content that is

engaging, relevant, and

appropriate to the

audience.

Content is the information

provided on a website. Do

not waste resources

providing easy access and

good usability to the

wrong content. One study

found that content is the

most critical element of a

website. Other studies

have reported that content

is more important than

navigation, visual design,

functionality, and interactivity. Asher, 1980; Badre, 2002; Baldwin, Peleg- Bruckner and McClintock, 1985;

Celsi and Olson, 1988;

Evans, 1998; Levine,

1996; Nielsen and

Tahir, 2001; Nielsen,

1997b; Nielsen, 2000;

Rajani and Rosenberg,

1999; Sano, 1996; Sinha et al., 2001; Spyridakis, 2000; Stevens, 1980. 5 5 Chapter three (Synchronize Multimedia Elements) To ensure accessibility, provide equivalent alternatives for multimedia

elements that are

synchronized.

For multimedia

presentations (e.g., a

movie or animation),

synchronize captions or

auditory descriptions of the

visual track with the

presentation.

Ahlstrom and Longo,

2001; Chisholm, Vanderheiden and Jacobs, 1999b; Galitz, 2002; Mayhew, 1992; United States Government, 1998. 3 2

2.4.11.3 JISC Guidelines

UK colleges and universities created the digital technology sector to support UK post- 16 and higher education. This sector helps research, administration, teaching and learning in the UK. JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) provides many services. Amongst these services is a new environment for learning, teaching and research, as well as guidance on institutional change. The JISC guidelines contain 121 guidelines relating to academic websites; of these 85 guidelines are designed for customers who are considering online courses, and the rest of guidelines consider digital libraries, portals and personalisation (Bevan & Kincla, 2004).

The purpose of this committee is to provide guidelines for JISC-funded services. There are two types of users. The committee focuses on JISC resource development and managers of JISC services. From sixteen institutions around the world, which responded to whether they have use HCI (Human Computer Interaction) design principles or

Chapter six: Page Layout.

(Align Items on a Page)

Visually align page elements, either vertically or horizontally.

Users prefer consistent alignments for items such as text blocks, rows, columns, checkboxes, radio buttons, data entry fields, etc. Use consistent alignments across all Web pages. Ausubel, 1968; Bailey, 1996; Esperet, 1996; Fowler, 1998; Spyridakis, 2000; Trollip and Sales, 1986; Voss et al., 1986; Williams, 1994; Williams, 2000. 4 5

Chapter Eleven: Text

Appearance.

(Use Familiar Fonts).

Use a familiar font to

achieve the best

possible reading speed.

Research shows no reliable

differences in reading

speed or user preferences

for twelve point Times

New Roman or Georgia

(Serif fonts), or Arial,

Helvetica, or Verdana.

Bernard and Mills,

2000; Bernard, Liao

and Mills, 2001a;

Bernard et al., 2002;

Boyarski et al., 1998;

Evans, 1998; Tullis,

Williams, 2000.

usability guidelines, only five of them said they have guidelines, and only one institution uses them (Bevan & Spinhof, 2007).

As presented above, the West enjoys a wealth of web design usability guidelines, which were developed over a long period of time and through many research studies. The purpose of these guidelines is to increase the usability of websites and the satisfaction of their users. These web guidelines cover various areas such as content, layout, navigation, images, animation, and interactivity. On the contrary, the Arab world suffers from lack of guidelines, and mainly relies on existing web design guidelines available from the West. This is justified due to the lack of research studies in this area by Arab researchers. However, the Arab culture is different from the British culture as demonstrated by Hofstede (2001). As such, culture influences the way users perceive and interact with websites. Thus, it is important to ensure that websites conform to the culture of the intended users; this research endeavours to cover this gap.

Indeed this is one of the first studies to shed light on the usability of Arabic websites in a systematic way, with the target of studying the judgment of Arabic users on usability and establishing specialised guidelines. These guidelines are expected to have various practical implications as discussed in Chapter 9.