THE ABSENCE OF IMPORTANT CAREWORDS AMONG UNIVERSITYWEBSITES: A PRELIMINARY STUDY ON WEB USABILITY

Most universities have a website with one of prevalent basic purpose is to provide an information to current and prospective students. The university web developers quite often neglect the process to incorporate customers’ voice during the development process, as suggested by the web usability, an area within humancomputer interaction (HCI) research. As many web users rely on a search engine to seek information, the inclusion of words that are most likely used by them (called carewords), in a web site are very critical. This paper aims to present a preliminary investigation of usability aspects in university websites, by focusing on the web content. This study applies Internet research methods. A simulation of a hypothetical case in which a prospective university student intends to study in Surabaya is performed. Search-words “kuliah di Surabaya”, “universitas di Surabaya”, and “kuliah teknik industri” are applied in Yahoo and Google search engines. The top 20 links obtained from each searching task are analyzed. Secondary data from EPSBED website was supplied to support the analysis. Furthermore, a content analysis using was conducted to selected websites of universities located in Surabaya. Overall, the findings emphasize that mismatch between the terms used by audiences and those presented in the web content could reduce the visibility of the website. Finally, this study suggests the university web developers to be more intensive applying usability principles to make their websites visible and accessible to potential students, as well as usable to other intended stakeholders.