Abstract
Educational websites are often used as effective communication mediums to provide useful information for students and course instructors. The current study explores the perceived usability of three top-ranked Arabic educational websites across seven key usability components: effectiveness, efficiency, learnability, memorability, errors, satisfaction, and content. Moreover, the study also identifies the key technical and usability issues that currently exist within Arabic educational websites. A two-phase process encompassing automated tools and user testing was adopted to evaluate the technical performance and student acceptance of Arabic educational websites. In the automatic evaluation, two tools, namely, Web Page Analyser and GTMetrix, assessed the websites against a number of well-known performance guidelines and criteria. The student evaluation entailed 150 students completing three interaction tasks and evaluating the sites using the CSUQ questionnaire. The findings indicate that Arabic educational websites suffered from various technical issues, such as a high number of HTML objects and their large size and, consequently, slow loading speed. Moreover, the websites failed to satisfy all usability components, and students rated them negatively. Relevant guidelines for the effective design of Arabic educational websites are also discussed in this paper.