Web usability: principles and evaluation methods

Abstract: Current Web applications are very complex and high sophisticated software products, whose usability can heavily determine their success or failure. Defining methods for ensuring usability is one of the current goals of the Web Engineering research. Also, much attention on usability is currently paid by Industry, which is recognizing the importance of adopting methods for usability evaluation before and after the application deployment. This chapter introduces principles and evaluation methods to be adopted during the whole application lifecycle for promoting usability. For each evaluation method, the main features, as well as the emerging advantages and drawbacks are illustrated, so as to support the choice of an evaluation plan that best fits the goals to be pursued and the available resources. The design and evaluation of a real application is also described for exemplifying the introduced concepts and methods