Towards continuous usability evaluation of web documents Yin Leng Theng, Gil Marsden and Harold Thimbleby School of Computing Science Middlesex University Bounds Green Road London N11 2NQ {y.theng, g.e.marsden, h.thimbleby}@mdx.ac.uk ABSTRACT To ensure continuous usability evaluation of web documents, this paper proposes integrating evaluation methods and techniques into practical authoring tools. KEYWORDS web, usability evaluation, authoring tools INTRODUCTION As the use of the Internet and the web grows, scalability not only refers to the handling of the increased number of servers, but also of handling the increased number of end-users. Because the web was not designed to handle so many and such large applications with more and more people using them, there are potential problems associated with the web, of which navigation is one of the more pressing problems. This view was supported by the results of the 8th Web User Survey by the Graphic, Visualisation and Usability Center conducted over October/November 1997 (Pitkow, Kehoe and Morton, 1997). The report showed that navigation is still a problem (16.7%) despite much research effort being invested to address it, as opposed to the top two problems of data privacy (30.5%) and censorship (24.2%). Often the development process of the web site follows the six stages described in the well-accepted iterative development lifecycle: (1) feasibility study; (2) conceptual design; (3) building; (4) implementation; (5) integration; and (6) maintenance. Unfortunately iterative design, which usually helps improve systems, has problems (Theng, 1997): (i) there is a lack of a disciplined and systematic approach to designing well-structured web documents to meet end-users’ behaviour and navigation needs; (ii) prototypes are not thoroughly tested before being developed into the final system; and (iii) end-users involved in the process experience too little of a system to help make significant design contributions. If the conventional iterative development process is found lacking, better ways to ensure that good web documents are produced are needed. This could be achieved by involving end-users and taking into account their needs throughout the design process. To ensure continuous usability evaluation of web documents, we propose integrating evaluation methods and techniques into practical authoring tools. These evaluation techniques are categorised under real user testing and non-human user testing (Theng, 1997). Real user testing includes observations, surveys, expert evaluation and experiments, and should be carried out before the system is ready for implementation so that qualitative results and impressions can be obtained. Non- human user testing methods are encouraged as a means to perform evaluation early enough to influence design while it can still change direction. Analytic and heuristic