Usability analysis for ‘Yipin’ courseware based on quantitative approach

Usability analysis has long been used by software or web developers to evaluate their products based on certain techniques and criteria. Researchers have developed various techniques and criteria to evaluate usability and one of the commonly used techniques is Heuristic Evaluation (HE). This paper describes the usability analysis for ‘Yipin’ courseware which was based on Heuristic Evaluation of Courseware (HECW). ‘Yipin’ courseware is a courseware developed to assist university students in learning basic Mandarin language while HECW is a set of heuristics used in the evaluation process specific for courseware. There were 10 experts involved in the evaluation and the data collected were analyzed based on a quantitative approach known as Usability of HECW (UsabHECW). UsabHeCW is a function to calculate the total percentage of the courseware usability. Based on the usability analysis, the critical usability for ‘Yipin’ courseware in each category which were Interface, Educational Elements, Content and Additional Elements had been determined. It could be concluded that the Interface and the Additional Element categories needed to be concentrated and improved most as their critical usability values were greater than 20%. The overall usability level of the courseware had indicated that the courseware was still needed to be improved and corrected in certain categories. The usability analysis which was based on USABHECW had proven to be a reliable technique in identifying usability problems for ‘Yipin’ courseware.