Model and Measurement for Web Application Usability from an End User Perspective

Determining quality for web applications requires an orientation beyond traditional quality models. Researchers have pointed to usability as a key component of web application quality. Usability is not a new quality characteristic. What is new is that it is a key success factor for web applications. For conventional software applications, usability may be a ‘nice to have’, but for web applications, it is critical due to the shifts in user expectations and business models that enable users to switch applications quickly. There has been little or no attention paid to measure software usability from an end-user viewpoint using quantitative methods. In this paper, we propose a model for web application usability from an end-user viewpoint and the basis for measurement and data collection methods to collect user activity and behavior.