INTEGRATING AHP INTO HEURISTIC EVALUATION TECHNIQUE TO ENHANCE USABILITY EVALUATION PROCESS

Abstract

Today people increasingly expect more from the functionality of a web site, so usability evaluation has emerged as an important topic. There is an increasing importance for higher usability in the web development industry and communities. This has necessitated the urge and drive for effective usability evaluation techniques. However, the need to measure usability of websites effectively have also prompted many researchers to develop different usability evaluation model. Different usability evaluation techniques have been developed and incorporated into the process of web site design and development. The research is aimed at improving the usability evaluation particularly heuristic evaluation technique by solving usability problems of Coursera as a Case Study. To this end, Heuristic Evaluation (HE) was comprehensively studied and its limitations were identified with the help of the case study. HE helps to identify usability problem but does not offer any framework to prioritize the most important heuristic and sub-heuristic. To improve the Heuristic Evaluation Process there is a need to create a framework that is based on the prioritization of the factors using Multi Criteria Decision Making Analysis (MCDA). Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was integrated into HE to prioritize and rank usability issues. Based on findings a framework to enhance the severity ranking is developed