Towards a Cost-Effective Evaluation Approach for Web Portal Interfaces Andrina Grani´ c, Ivica Mitrovi´ c, and Nikola Maranguni´ c Abstract A cost-effective approach for web portal usability evaluation is presented in this chapter. Due to specifics of portals as web sites, mainly referring to their structure and media specificities along with diversity of users, tasks and work- flows, distinct assessment approaches should be employed. Methodology brings together laboratory-based testing along with experts’ inspection and produces valu- able results for users and developers at a low cost. Compared to our first study, user assessment applied a faster and less expensive procedure, providing stability of measures with reduced sample size, while inspection employed fewer specialists with higher expertize and a simpler evaluation form. Directions of future work are identified. Keywords User testing · Guideline inspection · Cost-effective evaluation approach · Web portals 1 Introduction Current research on usability evaluation in general clearly searches for methods that produce beneficial results for users and developers at a low cost, perhaps with the economic of assessment as the most important factor, cf. [14, 19]. The aim of the overall research is the design of a cost-effective methodology for web portal interface evaluation. This chapter reports on just one part of this comprehensive research addressing design and results of the experimental study of news portals. The main motivation for this research initiative came from reports stating that broad-reach and news portals are the most visited Croatian web sites. In order to evaluate how efficient and easy to use those portals are, we conducted an experi- ment employing a range of assessment methods, both empirical and analytic. The proposed evaluation guides in conducting focused assessment activities, obtaining A. Grani´ c(B ) Faculty of Science, University of Split, Split, Croatia e-mail: andrina.granic@pmfst.hr 175 W.W. Song et al. (eds.), Information Systems Development, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7355-9_15, C  Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011