A study on the web design factors affecting the usability on information retrieval in the admissions of academic websites

The World Wide Web is a media that has been widely used for advertising and for information dissemination. This includes universities that want to attract prospective students into their institution. Academic websites contains information about a university such as history, vision, mission, courses offered, procedures for application, and contact information. The study involves the information retrieval in the admission process of the academic websites with the primary target audience of 4th year graduating high school students. Findings the desired and correct information in the shortest time indicates high performance. When people find the information they need in a short of time, their satisfaction rating increases, which translates to a higher user performance that indicates a usable website. An initial survey was conducted in order to gather pertinent information to help in conducting a usability testing of current academic websites. Websites design factors were also identified based on the errors committed by the participants of the usability testing and was analyzed through a Pareto analysis. It was identified that link design, labels used, navigation bar location, and content organization as web design factors that caused the most problems for the users. From the results, it was found that the information retrieval in the admissions processes of these websites are unusable due to long performance time, low success and satisfaction rating. Thus, this study aims to identify the interactions between websites design factors (link design, labels used, navigation bar location, and content organization) that affect user performance and satisfaction in order to improve the admissions process of an academic websites. Determining the interactions between web design factors would help in the understanding of the dependencies of the web design factors to one another. Identifying the dependencies between these web design factors will affect the way web design factors are incorporated into a websites, thus affecting the efficiency, success, and satisfaction of the user. A redesign for the information retrieval in the admission process of the academic websites was the output of this study. This design is expected to improve user performance and satisfaction. From using the aforementioned website design factors, a general factorial experimental consisting of 24 web design was created. Using efficiency, success, and satisfaction as the usability metrics, participants were gathered to evaluate the 24 website design. The data was gathered and summarized using the Morae software, which will then be entered into the design Expert software that will statistically analyze the data. Results showed that the efficiency of a website is significantly affected by the link design and content organization. Effectiveness (success) is significantly affected by link design, content organization, navigation bar location, labeling, and by all of the interactions between the factors. Satisfaction is significantly affected by link design, content organization, navigation bar location, labeling, interaction between labeling and content organization, and by an interaction between navigation and content organization. Optimization resulted to a new websites design that led to the proposed optimal design. Validation of the proposed optimal website design showed that it was indeed than the existing website. There were improvements in terms of the task time, success rating, and satisfaction rating that were revealed by the results of the statistical test of two means. The study showed that incorporating these web design factors would increase the usability of the academic website, most specifically in the information retrieval process of the academic websites