Generating a Domain Specific Checklist through an Adaptive Framework for Evaluating Social Networking Websites

The growth of the Internet and related technologies has enabled the development of a new breed of dynamic websites and applications that are growing rapidly in use and that have had a great impact on many businesses. These websites need to be continuously evaluated and monitored to measure their efficiency and effectiveness, to assess user satisfaction, and ultimately to improve their quality. The lack of an adaptive usability evaluation checklist for improvement of the usability assessment process for social network sites (SNSs) represents a missing piece in usability testing. This paper presents an adaptive Domain Specific Inspection (DSI) checklist as a tool for evaluating the usability of SNSs. The results show that the adaptive social network usability checklist helped evaluators to facilitate the evaluation process, and it helped website owners to choose the specific-context usability areas that they feel are important to their usability evaluations. Moreover, it was more efficient and effective than user testing and heuristics evaluation methods. Keywords—Heuristic evaluation (HE); User Testing (UT); Domain Specific Inspection (DSI); social networks domain; social