Analysis of Usability and Accessibility Problems of Financial Sectors’ Website using Visitor-based Evaluation Technique Rita Oluchi ORJI Computer Science Department University of Saskatchewan, Canada E-mail: rita.orji@usask.ca Abstract— Websites have become an important aspect of many organizations for conducting business, enabling efficient information sharing, and effective communication. Measuring the accessibility of these websites has become an important challenge for regulators, policy makers, and even to the businesses themselves. Therefore, many techniques have been developed and applied for checking website accessibility. However, most of these techniques were developed, tested, and used in developed countries with no substantial evidence of their applicability in developing countries. Moreover, the financial sector’s shift to online services calls for an adequate evaluation of accessibility of its websites. This work validates a visitor-based web evaluation (VBE) technique by applying it to the evaluation of twenty top banks in Turkey. The results of the evaluation shows that the major strengths of the banks’ websites include their comprehensibility, navigation, loading and viewing, and security with an average score of approximately 80% in each of the categories, while their major weaknesses include identity, personalization, speed, ease of use, and interactivity. The banks focus more on technical principles but not on the accessibility of their sites. Keywords: Web Evaluation,, Information Retrieval, Banking Sector, Web Metric, Visitor Based Web Evaluation. I. INTRODUCTION With the advent of Internet technologies, banking has taken a new dimension: geographical walls no longer limit the reach and operation of any bank. The Internet, with a user population of over a billion users and around 2 billion websites [12], provides banks with an unprecedented level of connectivity and ability to communicate efficiently and effectively with their customers. . The banking sector, just like any other profit-oriented business area, aims for customer satisfaction and retention. One of the most important services offered by banks is Internet banking, which is usually offered through the bank’s website. Providing an effective Internet banking experience necessitates ongoing monitoring, evaluation, and modification of the website to meet the need of their customers. Moreover, to support the future development and modification of bank websites, an evaluation that highlights strengths and weaknesses of the current situation is needed. Many evaluation techniques have been applied to ascertain the success of banks websites at achieving these goals. These include: WebXM, WebSAT, WebCAT, Booby, Any Browser, LPC, Web Tango, and KeyNotes [1] However, these techniques only cover some specific aspect of accessibility [1] and moreover, they are developed, validated, and used in developed countries without evidence of their applicability in developing countries. Visitor-based evaluation (VBE), which includes structural and content evaluation, is an evaluation technique that offers a more complete, quick, yet flexible and cost effective website evaluation approach [1][2]. This work applied VBE in evaluating the websites of twenty banks in Turkey The result from our evaluation shows that the major strengths of banks’ websites include their comprehensibility, navigation, loading and viewing, and security with an average score of approximately 80% in each of the categories, while their major weaknesses include identity, personalization, speed, ease of use, and interactivity. Banks focus more on the technical principles but not on the accessibility in sites. This study contributes in three ways: Firstly, it validates VBE. Secondly, it highlights strengths and weaknesses of banks’ websites and recommends some ways of improvement. Thirdly, successful completion of this work not only prove the applicability of an evaluation approach in developing countries but also highlights problems that might be associated with most of banks’ websites. II. RELATED WORK Website evaluation has been used extensively in human computer interaction to assess the usability and accessibility of websites. Many researchers have sought to establish content accessibility and usability of websites from different organizations and from different countries [4, 5, 3, 6]. Researchers did not look at websites’ strengths and weaknesses and whether these weaknesses could affect the online transactions on these sites. Blackmon et al. [7] used a theory-based usability inspection method to evaluate websites while Sloan et al. [12] proposed a meta-method of accessibility assessment. Beier and Vaughn [8] presented a multi-level framework for user interface design guidelines of web applications. While studies by Zaphiris and Zacharia [4], Ma and Zaphiris [5], Zaphiris and Ellis[3], and Maswera and Dawson [6] provided generic information, the study by Blackmon et al. [7] provided too specific information, which focuses on semantic similarity. Beier and Vaughn's [8] multi- level framework tried to bridge this gap by presenting a framework which provided both broad and specific usability guidelines. V1-252 2010 2nd International Conference on Information and Multimedia Technology (ICIMT 2010) C 978-1-4244-8882-7 /10/$26.00 2010 IEEE