A Systematic Review of Usability Evaluation in Web Development

The challenge of developing more usable Web applications has motivated the appearance of a number of techniques, methods and tools to address Web usability issues. Although there are many proposals for supporting the development of usable Web applications, many developers are not aware of them and many organizations do not properly apply them. This paper reports on a systematic review of the use of usability evaluation methods in Web development. The objective of the review is to investigate what usability evaluation methods have been employed by researchers to evaluate Web artifacts and how they were employed. A total of 51 research papers have been reviewed from an initial set of 410 papers. The results show that 45% of the papers reviewed reported the use of evaluation methods specifically crafted for the Web and that the most employed method is user testing. In addition, the results of the review have identified several research gaps. Specifically, 80% of the evaluations are still performed at the implementation phase of Web applications development and 47% of the papers did not present any validation of the usability evaluation method(s) employed.

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