A Balanced Usability Checklist Approach to Evaluate Palestinian Hotel Websites

This paper introduces a Balanced Usability Checklist (BUC) approach to assess the usability of ten Palestinian hotel websites. The BUC is a modified version of the known checklist analysis technique of user interfaces and includes dimensions for User Friendliness, Attractiveness, Marketing Effectiveness, and Technical Aspects of a website. Eight participants with experience in website design and usability were asked to evaluate each of the ten websites using the BUC approach. Overall, the hotel websites faired [sic] poorly on three out of the four dimensions. A relative ranking, based on the total score, was used to rank the hotels from 1 (highest) to 10 (lowest). This study has numerous implications, mainly for hotel managers wanting to improve the delivery of their services on the Internet. Results, limitations, and future research are discussed