Usability measures identify aspects crucial to business processes and user perspectives, being defined in terms of the characteristics they intend to evaluate, the performance of the measurement techniques as well as the data and information they refer to. Usability measures that are internal to the system usually refer to aspects of manual structuring, use of menus and graphs, informative system error messages, help messages to the user and existence of consistent interfaces. The external measures essentially refer to aspects of learnability and operability, in other words, they afford measurement of how easy it is to learn to work with that system and how productive it is to the user.
Published in Chapter:
Improving User Satisfaction in VO through Systems Usability
Dulce Magalhaes de Sá (Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 6
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-885-7.ch091
Abstract
The Web-based information systems regarded as a specific type of information system (IS) bring significant advantages to organizations and users because they are tools to manage, disseminate, and obtain knowledge. The advantages or benefits include creation of added value to goods and services, greater safety, better service, competitive advantage, error reduction, improved product quality, improved communication, efficiency, and productivity, greater administrative efficiency, more opportunities, cost reduction, reduction in labor requirements, stronger support to decision-making, stricter control over operations, and better decision choices (Stair, 1996).