Quality Evaluation of Educational Websites Using Heuristic and Laboratory Methods

Performing quality evaluation of a website, targets to draw certain conclusions, in order to determine if and in which degree the evaluated website features the required usability, measuring at the same time the users’ subjective satisfaction. In this paper we examine the evaluation of the new version of the Hellenic Open University (HOU) website. Among a variety of alternative evaluation approaches, we chose to apply the methods of heuristic evaluation and performance measurement that have been used in generic-type software. The evaluation was performed at the Software Quality Laboratory of the Hellenic Open University, in collaboration with experts in assessing software quality and usability (members of the Software Quality Research Group) as well as regular users (students of the HOU), aiming to draw parallel conclusions and to compare the derived results. The combination of these two evaluation methods revealed users’ non satisfaction and also usability problems that had not been traced in the website’s developing phase. We indicate that, by correcting these detected deficiencies, the website can evolve to become effective, efficient, and handy, providing personal satisfaction to its users.