双一流高校英文网站可用性研究

论文总字数：47763字

摘 要

近年来，越来越多的人将精力投入到网站的可用性测试中，因为网站的可用性决定了一个网站能否留住更多的用户，代表着一个网站存在的意义。高校的英文网站不仅仅是向外国用户介绍自己的学科专业和科研成果，吸引外国人才，更代表了高校在互联网上的国际公众形象。对其可用性很有必要进行探究。然而，以往的研究很少关注中国高校英语网站的可用性。

本研究采用个案研究法，通过焦点小组和有声思维，以清华大学门户网站英文版的可用性作为研究内容，选取清华大学门户网站的6名典型用户作为研究对象，研究双一流大学英文网站的可用性。根据自制的网站可用性重要性权重量表，要求6名受试者在使用清华大学门户网站时完成各种任务，并对整个过程进行观察和记录，发现案例网站存在以下问题：1）部分网站链接失败，内容未进行及时更新；2）网站的搜索栏需要更新其搜索逻辑；3）网站的导航结构需要进一步优化。

在此基础上，本研究对案例网站提出了建议意见，希望对所有“双一流”高校的英文网站设计具有一定的参考价值。

关键词： 可用性测试；英文网站；“双一流”高校；个案研究

Table of Content

Acknoledgement

Abstract i

摘要 ii

Chapter One Introduction 1

1.1 Background of the Study 1

1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study 2

1.3 Overview of the Study 2

Chapter Two Literature Review 4

2.1 Usability and Usability Testing 4

2.2 Studies of English Websites 5

2.3 Studies of Usability Testing 6

Chapter Three Research Methodology 8

3.1 Research Question 8

3.2 Material 9

3.3 Participants 10

3.5 Think-aloud 12

3.6 Data Collection and Data Analysis 13

3.7 Summary 14

Chapter Four Result and Discussion

4.1 Aspects Affecting the Usability of English Websites of Double First Class Universities 15

4.1.1 Navigation 15

4.1.2 Structure 15

4.1.3 Interaction 16

4.1.4 Design 17

4.1.5 Content 17

4.2 Measures to Strengthen the Usability of English Websites of Double First Class Universities 18

4.2.1 Navigation 19

4.2.2 Structure 19

4.2.3 Interaction 19

4.2.4 Design 19

4.2.5 Content 19

Chapter Five Conclusions 22

5.1 Major Findings 22

5.2 Implications 23

5.3 Limitation 23

5.3 Suggestions for Future Research 23

References 25

Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the Study

This research is one of the hot issues of the field of technical communication of the discipline of applied linguistics. In the past decade, the advancement of science and technology has brought about the era of information explosion. People are increasingly using electronic devices such as laptops, desktops and smart-phones to access information on the Internet. The Internet has become the first channel to obtain information in the new era. Thousands of people use the Internet to get information all the time. Therefore, designers of Internet websites must spend time and energy creating and promoting perfect ones with high usability.

Usability has become a hot issue in many fields, such as computer science and engineering. For linguistic researchers, the usability of a website is to judge the effectiveness and integrity of its information content, and also to summarize and improve the design of its words and sentences, and even its composition.

China's double first class universities, especially the world-class universities represented by Tsinghua University and Peking University, are very attractive to foreign scholars and students. Therefore, the official websites of these universities, as portals for external publicity, are very important to experts, scholars and students to fully understand the content and meaning of the due date, that is, the degree of their usability. College educational portal is not only a platform to interact with visitors, but also helps shape its public image.

A review of the current research on the usability of college portals reveals two characteristics. First, the importance of the usability of college education portals is generally recognized, but there are only a small number of studies s discussing usability. Second, usability provides some important design elements for website design. However, previous studies have not examined the relative importance of usability design features of educational websites from the perspective of students.

Therefore, it is imperative to improve the usability of the official English websites of China’s universities in order to respond to the purpose of the their opening to the outside world and the integration of international academic exchanges, introducing more advanced foreign talents, and making the overseas students have a better experience of studying abroad.

This study, after deciding on the factors that influence website usability according to the results of a focus group activity, mainly uses the think-aloud method in a usability test to find out the usability status quo of the target website. By inquiring and summarizing the use process of the participants, the usability problems of Tsinghua University’s English website are found, so as to provide the direction for further improvement of it.

1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study

Tsinghua university is one of the best universities in China, closest to the world's top academic level. Its educational and teaching environments are also the most attractive to outstanding foreign scholars and students, so Tsinghua university was selected as the research subject.

For a long time, China's excellent universities have courageously advanced towards the goal of being world-class, but they are trapped by such problems as the inability to share excellent achievements with the international community, the inability to display a good educational environment, the insufficient attraction for excellent foreign teachers and overseas students, and the lack of opportunities for collaborative innovation. So, it is urgent to promote the campus portal, which is the most important way to publicize and attract outstanding teachers and students.

China's development has entered a new stage, and universities as a talent training base also need to keep pace with the times, open up to the outside world, show their excellent side, at the same time attract excellent international students to study in China, and retain international talents by improving their study experience in domestic universities. Web usability testing, especially for schools, is still in its infancy. This paper tries to implement the goal of "excellent domestic students going out and excellent foreign students being recruited" in the university, and makes contributions to the publicity and display of school spirit, school appearance as well as the publicity of school policies.

1.3 Overview of the Study

There are five chapters in this research.

The first chapter is an introductory part of the study. It consists of the research background and the purpose and significance of it.

The second chapter is about the literature review. There would be many points of views towards usability testing and portal and focus group in this chapter.

The third chapter is about the research methodology. It introduces the questions, participants as well as procedures of the research. Also include the data analyses.

The forth chapter is the main section of this thesis. The results would be reported in that chapter.

The final chapter is the conclusion part of the research. In that section it would not only reemphasize the findings from the research, but also point out some limitations of this study and suggestions for future research.

Chapter Two Literature Review

2.1 Usability and Usability Testing

As an academic field of human-computer interaction design, usability testing has been widely studied abroad, and domestic research is not deep enough. The concept of usability originated from human factors engineering during World War II. It has been applied to computerized drinking utensils since the 1980s and is now the main indicator for evaluating Internet products.

The earliest definition of "usability" was made by Nielsen (1993), who defined "availability" as: "Evaluating the user-friendly quality attributes of the user interface".These quality attributes can be summarized as: easy to learn, effective, easy to remember, low error rate and high satisfaction.

At the same time, usability theory has formed a user-centered design methodology (UCD) in the continuous development, emphasizing the user. The center is developed to effectively evaluate and improve the quality of product availability. The definition of usability in the international standard IS09241/11 is: the extent to which a product can be used by a specific user in a specific situation, effective, efficient and satisfactory to achieve a specific goal (The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.).

Therefore, through usability testing, we can understand the degree of recognition of the website interface, function, and process of each representative target user, and learn about the possibility of improvement, especially in the interaction process when we can get some very good rules of user behavior.

Kong (2016) claimed that a website usability evaluation in the website development cycle is a very important part. However, fast-paced software development programs often lead to the neglect of this process by relevant developers, especially college portals.

Nowadays, the Internet is gradually becoming a complex information system that pays more attention to interactivity and provides a platform for database and enterprise information system. In the context of gathering information, completing complex tasks, learning, and entertainment among classmates, the application of portal website as a medium increases the importance of usability.

2.2 Studies of English Websites

Foreign countries have a lot of literature on theoretical and empirical explorations of usability. Mustafa and Al-Zola'bi (2008) evaluated the availability of nine Jordanian university websites. The assessment was conducted using questionnaires and online web tools, and after completing the relevant literature studies they presented 23 standard availability lists for website usability. The list is divided into five levels: organization and readability of content, navigation and connectivity, user interface design, performance efficiency, and educational information, each of which corresponds to different types of usability issues.
In 2012, Manzoor and Hussain designed the “Network Usability Model” and used it to evaluate the portals of 10 universities in Asia. The evaluation of the website is divided into two phases. First, they conducted problems in 30 students from three universities to obtain problems students encountered during human-computer interaction. After analyzing the results, they proposed a model (WUEM) to evaluate the target website. The WUEM contains 17 levels of test criteria, namely web content, web design, navigation, page design layout, and accessibility.
Roy and Pattnaik(2013) explored different usability techniques and examined which of these technologies can be applied to the assessment of the usability of the website. In addition, they are concerned about two new usability attributes, namely physical disabilities and device independence. This also provides new improvements to the website update.

These three studies provided several aspects of the usability of university websites. In this study, I designed a reasonable research process by combining the above literatures and adding my own understanding.
At present, there are few studies on the usability of university portals in China, and empirical articles are rare. The current literature is often limited to the theoretical exploration of website usability indicators and the construction of the system. However, these studies provide some useful materials for further research and development of university website availability in the future. Some domestic related research results are listed below.
Wang and Ke (2013) proposed that the construction of university websites should be based on the user's perspective, and construct the development evaluation content of the university portal website from the perspective of website usability, instead of constructing content from content, design, operation and maintenance, system, and personnel funding. They believed that the usability research of university websites should be carried out around four first-level indicators, namely information resources, information organization, user interface and website accessibility.

Meng (2014) used heuristic assessment, cognitive walk-through, and usability testing to evaluate the usability of Chinese social networking sites. This is one of the few excellent experiments to verify usability. In addition, their research also proposed a new evaluation index —— the number of hesitations. the number of hesitations during the operation of the test was recorded, reflecting the letter and the uncertainty encountered during the operation of the test.

Generally speaking, the current domestic research on university portals is often limited to the establishment of evaluation systems. Most of the methods used are mathematical modeling methods, but for the user experience of actual user needs, user operating habits and patterns, and subjective use experience. The relevant fields are rarely touched. Foreign research is more adequate for this aspect of research, and the methodological thinking is worth learning from.

2.3 Studies of Usability Testing

At present, most of the usability tests at home and abroad adopt focus group method, and are revised according to Nielsen's (1993) website usability model. The feedback from users on the website should be modified and improved purposefully. "Focus group interview" was born in the United States in the 1950s. In 1946, sociologist Robert Morton and Kendall from Columbia University published "Focus Group Interview" in the American journal of sociology. Morton believes that through focus group interviews, it is possible to find out the exact reason for people's acceptance of a particular thing, thought or behavior. Focus group interview as a qualitative survey method, originated from western hermeneutics. Habermas (1981) connected hermeneutics with communicative behavior theory and developed more critical hermeneutics. According to this idea, social research has the function of clarifying all kinds of beliefs, plans, motives and social functions, and guiding the cognitive motivation of producing texts and behaviors.

Xing(2016) believes that focus group interviews allow participants to discuss freely, so they can generate multiple ideas and perspectives. They can express themselves accurately and freely. Meanwhile, during the study, the researchers could not only listen to the focus group discussion, but also observe the participants' voices, intonations, expressions and conflicts. This will not only help the researchers identify the phenomenon, but also help them understand the significance of the discussion. This is different from investigation because investigation only studies specific phenomena. Focus groups have a naturalistic nature that allows participants to provide a wealth of information.

Zhang(2014) claims that in user experience research, focus group method is usually manifested as gathering a group of people to discuss a specific problem and obtaining qualitative data, so as to understand users' views on new views, new services, new products, new equipment, etc., and making them meet users' requirements through improvement. This is a rigorous and scientific qualitative research method, which is conducive to more specific understanding and transmission of users' ideas, and lays a foundation for further in-depth analysis. The implementation of focus group method requires sufficient preparation and the design of relevant content, including the determination of research topics and sample selection, the arrangement of group interview space and time, and the analysis of the obtained data. Among them, for the sample selection of focus groups, although there are discussions about homogeneous or heterogeneous participants, there are usually more homogeneous group members, because they have the same or similar background and experience, which can generate opportunities for sharing and facilitate communication.

Chapter Three Research Methodology

3.1 Research Questions

In the research process, the following two questions are raised:

1. What are the aspects that weaken the usability of English websites of double first class universities?
2. What should be done to strengthen the usability of English websites of double first class universities?

Through the extension of these two questions, the specific questions for the six members of the focus group were formulated.All of the tasks and questions developed in the study were based on solving the above two problems.

3.2 Material

The picture below shows the English website of Tsinghua university. The option in the upper right corner provides a shortcut for users with different identities to find the best matching information. Below it is a drop-down menu that provides navigation for the user. The banner picture is made up of large size pictures, which are usually records of big events at school, which also can be regarded as a background image for the site. Below are links to news and school events. At the bottom of the site are multimedia materials for school campuses and student activities. Then are all kinds of accounts and contact information of Tsinghua University on the Internet, including Twitter and Facebook accounts commonly used by foreign students and scholars. Besides, telephone contact information and email contact information are also showed at the bottom of the website.

3.3 Participants

There are 6 foreign participants in this focus group. All of them are college students of Southeast University. Half male and half female. Their ages ranged from 20 to 25. They have independently applied for overseas study in Chinese colleges and universities in the past year, and are familiar with the websites of domestic colleges and universities. In addition, their past experience of using the Internet can provide effective information for research.

Table 3.1 Information about the Participants

3.4 Focus Group

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