Investigating the Relative Importance of Design Criteria in the Evaluation of the Usability of Educational Websites from the Viewpoint of Students

The importance of considering usability in the design and development of educational websites is well recognised. However, there is a lack of research which has exposed the design features students prefer on an educational website. This research developed specific criteria for evaluating the usability of educational websites consisting of 25 design issues distributed into five major categories: navigation, organisation / architecture, ease of use and communications, design, and content. Then the relative importance of the categories and subcategories of the developed criteria in the evaluation of the usability of educational websites was investigated from the viewpoint of 237 students. A further step was taken to determine if the relative importance differed based on the gender and major / specialisation of the students involved in the research (where students were selected from two faculties: Information Technology and Administration). The results showed that the order of the criteria from the most to the least important in the evaluation of the usability of educational websites from the viewpoint of students was: content, navigation, ease of use and communications, design, and organisation / architecture. The results also showed that there was a statistically significant difference between males and females regarding only one category: the content. Females considered it as the most important category while males considered it as the second most important category. However, the results showed that there were no statistically significant differences between the students of the two selected faculties regarding the relative importance of the criteria.