Abstract
Today usability is a crucial factor that can affect any website. The purpose of this study is to explore major usability defects within Saudi university websites in comparison to British university websites from a Saudi student perspective. In addition, students are expected to achieve their goal when surfing a Saudi Arabian university website comfortably and efficiently without any complication. This study uses two methods to evaluate and measure usability problems; user testing and thinking aloud. Both methods are very useful and effective for collecting data from participants. Based on the ranking of the universities, 60 students were split evenly into three groups; each group was asked to evaluate a different pair of university websites from different ranking levels, one from the UK and the other from KSA. The evaluation performed by each group was gathered using the SUS (System Usability Scaling) questionnaire to find flaws within the usability of the website. During the experiment, the participants' opinions were collected using the thinking aloud method. The findings of this research showed that all Saudi universities in all tiers had significant problems within the usability of their websites. The most frequent problems found were, inconsistency, integration, confidence and satisfaction. Other less frequent problems that were found during this study were design concepts, easy use of websites and comfort of students. Saudi universities can learn from the differences in the quality between both sides to upgrade and redesign their website to achieve user satisfaction, therefore increasing the confidence of the users.