Issues in Improving the Web Usability

Abstract

Websites are great source for end users to get valuable and current information now a day. Since inception, they proved to be an effective medium of communication between end users and business organizations. People are doing varieties of their regular tasks on the web such as: online shopping of products and goods, booking of tickets, transferring funds, reading books, learning and sharing online etc. Hence user requires to have a website which is easily accessible and acceptable. Web usability is one of the prominent measure which helps to make websites accessible and acceptable. Because of this reason usability of the website should get enough attention to retain users and their interest on the website. newlineIt requires identifying the parameters which play key role in building the usability of the website. Different parameters of web usability were identified and tested for their reliability in the proposed work. A statistical technique called Reliability Analysis was applied to find internal consistency and reliability of such parameters and all the parameters were found reliable. These parameters were then reduced into four factors for further analysis. Factor Analysis technique was used to reduce number of factors in the research. newlineStudy found that Navigation and Ease of use are two prominent measures to enhance the quality of the website in terms of web usability. To ease navigation it is required to study browsing behaviours of end users to get insights about user s choice. In this study, Web Usability Recommendation Model (WURM) is proposed in which usage patterns of end users were identified from web server log data of two different websites. Such web server log data contains irrelevant and redundant entries in huge volume which restrict researchers to perform any intelligence knowledge discovery techniques on such data hence data pre-processing is highly required. Different data pre-processing algorithms were proposed and implemented in this study to perform pre-processing task effectively and with greater