A framework for generating a domain specific inspection evaluation method: A comparative study on social networking websites

The growth of the Internet and related technologies has enabled the development of a new breed of dynamic websites and applications that are growing rapidly in use and that have had a great impact on many businesses. These websites need to be continuously evaluated and monitored to measure their efficiency and effectiveness, to assess user satisfaction, and ultimately to improve their quality. The lack of a methodological framework that can be used to generate a domain-specific evaluation method, which can then be used to improve the usability assessment process for a product in any chosen domain, represents a missing piece in usability testing. This paper proposes such a framework and evaluates it by generating an evaluation method, called Domain Specific Inspection (DSI), and then analysing it empirically by applying it on the social networks domain. Our experiments show that this framework is able to build a formative and summative evaluation method that provides optimal results with regard to the identification of comprehensive usability problem areas and relevant usability evaluation method (UEM) metrics, with minimum input in terms of the cost and time usually spent on employing UEMs.