Abstract
The electronic information revolution and the use of computers as an essential part of everyday life are now more widespread than ever before, as the Internet is exploited for the speedy transfer of data and business. Social networking sites (SNSs), such as LinkedIn, Ecademy and Google+ are growing in use worldwide, and they present popular business channels on the Internet. However, they need to be continuously evaluated and monitored to measure their levels of efficiency, effectiveness and user satisfaction, ultimately to improve quality. Nearly all previous studies have used Heuristic Evaluation (HE) and User Testing (UT) methodologies, which have become the accepted methods for the usability evaluation of User Interface Design (UID); however, the former is general, and unlikely to encompass all usability attributes for all website domains. The latter is expensive, time consuming and misses consistency problems. To address this need, a new evaluation method is developed using traditional evaluations (HE and UT) in novel ways.
The lack of an adaptive methodological framework that can be used to generate a domain-specific evaluation method, which can then be used to improve the usability assessment process for a product in any chosen domain, represents a missing area in usability testing. This paper proposes an adaptive framework that is readily capable of adaptation to any domain, and then evaluates it by generating an evaluation method for assessing and improving the usability of products in a particular domain. The evaluation method is called Domain Specific Inspection (DSI), and it is empirically, analytically and statistically tested by applying it on three websites in the social networks domain. Our experiments show that the adaptive framework is able to build a formative and summative evaluation method that provides optimal results with regard to our newly identified set of comprehensive usability problem areas as well as relevant usability evaluation method (UEM) metrics, with minimum input in terms of the cost and time usually spent on employing traditional usability evaluation methods (UEMs).