Evaluating usability of a web application: A comparative analysis of open-source tools

Usability refers to the success rate of any software product in terms of the extent up to which it is able to meet the expectations and requirements of the users and designers. Usability testing is the assiduous process of evaluating any application for its worth from users perspective. Usability testing can be done in a number of ways but the common point to all of these tests is identification of testing metrics. This work aims at testing and analyzing the usability of an academic website. The testing technique used is split testing or A/B testing, in which two versions of same application are used for a comparative analysis to determine the final result. Navigability, readability, loading speed, accessibility and functional performance are used as evaluation metrics. Five independent testing tools have been used to assess these metrics individually. The outcomes of these tools are analyzed and interpreted to conclude the usability and in the process the performance of these tools were also evaluated as to which tool provided the most optimized results. From the analysis, we conclude that the second version of the website with enhanced interface and added in-site search functionality was more usable and the tool that was found to provide most optimized results for this study was Google Analytics.