Usability analysis of IxDA.org

Abstract

The International Standards Organization definition of usability as documented in ISO 9241-11 is for “…specified users… specified goals… particular environments” which implies that usability varies based on those three factors. The System Usability Scale (SUS) is a ten item questionnaire developed to evaluate systems’ usability. Consequently, SUS became the scale of choice for measuring usability, broadly applied to various systems including websites. Contemporary websites are visited by a wide range of users for different reasons and from all kinds of environments - can SUS still effectively measure their usability? For a professional organization such as IxDA whose focus is user interface design a heuristic evaluation aided by the Expert Review Checkpoints provides detailed feedback on its website’s compliance with contemporary design standards that affect usability.