NIST DEVELOPS BENCHMARKING WEB SITE USABILITY METHODOLOGIES (CIFter).

NIST is developing methodologies to measure the usability of Web sites. Empirical evidence from research and commercial sources indicates that Web sites suffer from a lack of usability. Measuring usability of Web sites is more complicated than measuring usability of desktop applications. One difficulty is defining typical users and typical tasks, given the diverse audience of users. A second difficulty relates to the wide variety of measurement methodologies that are the repertoire of the usability engineer. Another major confounding factor is that Web sites are dynamic, i.e., there are day-to-day, minute-to-minute, and query-to-query differences in the content of sites.

To address these issues, NIST initiated a project called CIFter (Common Industry Format for Testing Usability Evaluation Reports). NIST then recruited approximately 10 groups of usability evaluators to begin the CIFter study. A CD with the Web site snapshot, tasks, and NIST WebMetrics tools was released to the evaluators on Dec. 31, 2000. Evaluation results will be submitted to NIST in the next 6 months and analyzed to determine the value of using such collections to derive benchmarks of usability engineering methodologies.