Assessing a Firm's Web Presence: A Heuristic Evaluation Procedure for the Measurement of Usability

Web site usability is a critical metric for assessing the quality of a firm's Web presence. A measure of usability must not only provide a global rating for a specific Web site, ideally it should also illuminate specific strengths and weaknesses associated with site design. In this paper, we describe a heuristic evaluation procedure for examining the usability of Web sites. The procedure utilizes a comprehensive set of usability guidelines developed by Microsoft. We present the categories and subcategories comprising these guidelines, and 7discuss the development of an instrument that operationalizes the measurement of usability. The proposed instrument was tested in a heuristic evaluation study where 1,475…