Sirius: A heuristic-based framework for measuring web usability adapted to the type of website

The unquestionable relevance of the web in our society has led to an enormous growth of websites offering all kinds of services to users. In this context, while usability is crucial in the development of successful websites, many barely consider the recommendations of experts in order to build usable designs. Including the measurement of usability as part of the development process stands out among these recommendations. One of the most accepted methods for usability evaluation by experts is heuristic evaluation. There is abundant literature on this method. However, there is a lack of clear and specific guidelines to be used in the development and evaluation process. This is probably an important factor contributing to the aforementioned generalized deficiency in web usability.We miss an evaluation method based on heuristics whose measure is adapted to the type of evaluated website. In this paper we define Sirius, an evaluation framework based on heuristics to perform expert evaluations that takes into account different types of websites. We also provide a specific set of evaluation criteria, and a usability metric that quantifies the usability level achieved by a website depending on its type.

► We propose Sirius, a new framework to measure web usability by experts, based on heuristic evaluation.
► Unlike most methods, this measure considers and depends on the type of the evaluated website.
► A new classification of websites, a set of criteria and evaluation values is defined.
► The framework was empirically tested with 43 company websites of the USA Nasdaq index.
► The results confirm the validity of the measures of usability provided by Sirius.