Evaluating the Usability of a Teacher-Created Website

Abstract

Increased internet access to more and more families provides schools with yet another avenue for encouraging parents to be involved in their children’s education. K-12 schools frequently use classroom websites to improve parent-teacher communication. Although there have been recent studies on teacher perspectives for teacher-created websites, designing websites to enhance learning, and “best” website design elements, few recent usability studies on teacher-created websites were found. This usability study attempted to determine the design and navigation effectiveness of a teacher-created Senior Project website. The study design was based on suggestions provided by Steve Krug’s, Rocket Surgery Made Easy (2010). Parents of high schools students were the target audience for this study. The results of this usability study determined the Senior Project website’s design and navigation to be effective for its intended purpose with most participants’ comments and responses being positive and very complimentary. The results indicated that while effective website design can increase the effectiveness of users’ information search behaviors, successful web searches are highly dependent on users’ domain knowledge, their ability to recognize common website conventions and visual cues, to determine when to scan or read website content, and to avoid what Krug (2014) calls “satisfice” behavior.