A practical approach to the assessment of quality in use of corporate web sites

• A novel perspective on web site quality based on stakeholders.
• A comprehensive and structured model for quality in use of corporate web sites.
• A practical methodology for the assessment of expected quality in use.
• An evaluation exercise with seven corporate web sites.

The paper presents a practical approach to web site quality, based on a novel perspective that considers the relationships between the web site and its stakeholders. This perspective leads to identify four fundamental concepts of quality: final quality, quality in use, basic quality and internal quality. This paper focuses on quality in use, and proposes a new quality model including a well structured and balanced set of characteristics and sub-characteristics, which aim at capturing the main dimensions that impact on the quality of a web site. The distinction between actual and expected quality is then introduced and a practical assessment methodology for expected quality (EQ-EVAL) is proposed, which employs expert evaluators instead of actual users in order to make the evaluation less expensive, without sacrificing, however, accuracy and reliability. The results of the application of the methodology in the evaluation of a sample set of corporate web sites are finally discussed, showing how the model and the methodology can indeed meet the stated requirements.