THE ROLE OF USABILITY IN THE COMPETITIVENESS OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS Atilano Suarez Instituto Politécnico de Bragança – Serviços de Imagem Campus de Santa Apolónia – 5301-854 Bragança – Portugal atilano@ipb.pt Rui Silva Moreira Universidade Fernando Pessoa – Faculdade de Ciência e Tecnologia Praça 9 de Abril, 349 – 4249-0044 Porto – Portugal rjm@inesc.pt Eurico Carrapatoso Universidade do Porto – Faculdade de Engenharia – Dep. de Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores INESC Porto R. Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n – 4200-465 Porto – Portugal emc@fe.up.pt ABSTRACT The increasingly competitive environment of the Portuguese higher education system stresses the need of a market- oriented offer, coordinated with the institutional websites. In this paper we describe an attempt to integrate marketing and webdesign techniques, supported by usability studies. A usability study was performed on the website of the Instituto Politécnico de Bragança (IPB), employing guerrilla usability techniques focusing different target groups. The following redesign tried to address usability problems found, and involved the inclusion of affective and emotional multimedia contents, added to the usual objective and rational information. The response of the target groups to the changes was assessed by means of a new round of usability testing. KEYWORDS Higher education websites, target groups, guerrilla usability, multimedia, differentiation, affective information. 1. INTRODUCTION The Portuguese higher education system is going through a transformation process which reflects changes also endured by other fields of activity and production systems. The enterprises and businesses, being past the processes of mass marketing, are trying to cope with the need for a marketing segmentation approach and the corresponding product and public differentiation, by taking advantage of sophisticated information and communication systems, as is the case of the Internet (Brito, 1998; Kotler & Fox, 1995). The higher education system is under similar influences which forces it to move from a granted “mass education” status towards an increasingly aggressive and competing scenario where a diminishing community of clients (e.g., students, sponsors) is disputed and must be captivated by appealing and well promoted education and investigation products. This change of circumstances, along with demographic issues and government education policies, made the organizations of higher education shift from a position of passive student admission to a very different one, of student recruitment (Dehne, 2002). Some studies point out that the choice of media used to promote the products of the higher education institutions (Lopes, 2002) differs from those favored by the prospective students assessing these offers (Torres, 2004). Moreover, the Internet approach is considered as the media to be chosen in the framework of institutional communications.