Comparison of University Course Search Interfaces

Universities must implement interactive and useful search tools that allow students to search and find various courses that they wish to enroll. In this study, a comparison is made between three different University course search tools. These include the University of Nevada, Reno, Harvard University, and University of California, Berkeley. Participants in the study executed various tasks on each website and then compared each website based on ease of use and efficiency. While each web page has different strengths, the results showed that many preferred certain design elements over others such as a more simplistic design with a clear layout. This paper details the various comparisons made between the websites through experimental tasks as well as how data was gathered, analyzed, and processed.