Usability Study On Higher Learning Institutions‟ Website: The Case Of Academic Staff In Selected Ethiopianpublic Universities

Abstract

Web sites are rising as a key component of an organization‟s and institution‟s survival in our ever globalizing competitive world. Usability of a website has assumed a great deal of importance in terms of satisfying website users‟ needs and expectations. Usability is one of the major factors that determine the successfulness of a website. It is important therefore to have certain measurement methods to assess and evaluate the usability of websites. This measurement issued to help website designers make their websites more usable. Most higher learning institutions‟ websites in Ethiopia do not have appropriate design which means inappropriate use of font, color, image and other usability features. The lack of adequate researches on the area also contributes its share for this problem. The main objective of the study is to determine usability of higher learning institutions website: based on some selected Ethiopian public Universities, from academic‟s staff‟s perspective. A usability model was adopted from QIUM (2006) and designed based on open and closed ended questioners and observation results the sample size of 345 academic staffs was chosen from population of 3097 academic staffs from two selected universities by using proportional sampling technique then followed by simple random sampling and data was collected through questionnaires and observation. The methodology employed to conduct this study was survey research design and the respondents, drawn from two Ethiopian public higher learning institution (PHLI) of academic staffs used to answer the research questions that come out through the review of existing literature as well as the study statistically analyzes in SPSS by using descriptive and inferential statistics as well observation was interpreted and discussed. The findings of this study revealed the usability factors identified from the analysis of the results: reliability, efficiency, understandability, content, interactivity and multiple language support, ease of use and communication and design layout. This research suggests that the developers of higher learning institution websites should consider the above issues and other most common usability problems identified in this research in order to improve usability of the universities‟ websites.