User-centred web development for GMI alumni website

Abstract

The internet has become an influential tool for the society nowadays. In addition, the World Wide Web (WWW) technology is an appropriate partner of the internet that offers pleasant facility in order to facilitate people’s daily lives. However, the recent situation is changing whereby the primary concern is more on developing usable website to ensure the user’s satisfaction. User-centred is one of a technique that can be used in order to maximize the web usability as well as the user’s satisfaction. Websites or products have been built by several researches by incorporating the usercentred design process to ascertain that it meets the users’ needs. In the context of this study, a framework has been employed with a human-centred approach in order to redevelop the GMI alumni website. The user’s role has been placed in the centre of the redevelopment process to ensure that the outcome meet the requirements and passed the usability criteria. Several techniques which are qualitative and quantitative were conducted to acquire and analyse the data. Paper-based and unstructured interview were utilised in the requirements elicitation whereas the focus group was employed in the pre-evaluation process and finally, web-based survey was conducted to assess the web usability. These techniques were used with the objective to collect the required data which were later taken into an analysis process. In terms of data analysis, the SPSS tool was utilised to analyse the paper-based questionnaire systematically, the unstructured interview was transcribed to gain useful insight, theme and code were developed from the retrieved focus group data and fuzzy conjoint analysis was utilised in the electronic survey. Design consideration was an integrated element to judge on the suitable requirements expressed by clients and users to be added in the website. There were six metrics adapted to examine the web usability which are the effectiveness, learnability, control, ease of use, attractiveness and satisfaction. Acquired results for the satisfaction parameter showed that the users are strongly agreed that the delivered product meets their satisfaction. This result proved that by incorporating the user-centred technique in the redevelopment process, the web usability can be increased and the users are satisfied with the end product.