Information system professionals’ knowledge and application gaps toward Web design guidelines

Web design guidelines are adopted by many usability evaluation methods as one of the criteria for success, while usability is proven to significantly impact Website performance. Since Web design guidelines cover a broad range of system and interface design solutions, knowledge of them can be considered as a prominent indicator of Web design skills for information systems (IS) professionals. This study empirically assessed how much IS professionals know and apply Web design guidelines via a survey to 500 randomly selected companies from Taiwan’s Fortune 2000 corporations. As expected, the knowledge–application gaps of IS professionals were statistically significant in all Web design guideline categories. Meanwhile, certain guideline categories were proven to be more difficult to acquire or apply than others. Finally, degree, gender, experience, training hours, and courses taken were also proven to be determining factors for Web design guideline skills. Implications for developing Web design guideline skills are also discussed.