Development of a Generator System of Parameterized Questionnaires to Evaluate the Usability of Web Pages

Abstract

The effectiveness of using websites have a strong dependence on their ergonomic qualities, which affect directly the business. This is more significant when related to the e-commerce, especially considering the little known companies. To verify ergonomic features in a website, the evaluator may conduct inspections based on questionnaires that are answered by him/her or by final users to provide information about the interface. In this paper, our goal was the development of an application that automatically generates ergonomic questionnaires to evaluate the usability of web sites. The main idea is to select specific questionnaires and specific questions that must be parameterized according to the users choice. Among these parameters, are the interaction elements present in the pages that compose the website, such as scroll bars, buttons, hyperlinks, windows, text fields and others. The analysis of the questionnaire responses, provides data to build better usability interfaces, resulting in less time and effort to achieve their goals, and thus, delivering positive results. These questionnaires and their responses can be stored in a database for future reference and may support new usability assessments. The tool was used by 22 evaluators. These users are aged between 19 and 30 years, and have some connection with the University of Sao Paulo. Correlations were also made between some questions to see if there was any relationship between them.