4th W: Web Evaluation

Like all organized projects, web projects have to be evaluated before being published. This is especially important because web pages are becoming important resources for the users and to assess their instructional qualities. Evaluation can employ experts, normal people and others experiences.

Web Evaluation Process

Web evaluation must be both formative and summative. Formative evaluation is done during the process of making the web project and usually by experts and designers themselves. Summative evaluation on the other hand is done to the final outcome employing experts and a sample of the targeted users.

The evaluation of a website should consider the usability of the website. The usability can be measured through five quality components: learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors and satisfaction of the audience. In addition to that we need to look at the accessibility of the website through measuring seven factors. These are navigation & page layout, visual presentation & customization, text descriptions for images, accessible mark-up for forms, lists, scripts and tables, use & presentation of written language, accessible issues for other media types and help, searches, errors & documentation.

Observation, in-depth interviews, surveys, focus groups, analysis, reports, and dialogue with users in addition to form, checklist or rubric; all of these can be the tools of evaluation.

Web Evaluation Form

When developing an evaluation form for a website we should consider designing different form for different user’s level – age (children, teenagers, or adults), types of users (novice or expert). The items in a web evaluation form should be based on the objectives of evaluation.

In designing the evaluation form for the website we have to give special consideration for reliability and validity. The results given by the form has to be reliable which means that the same results should be obtained when applying the evaluation form on another website with the same characteristics. The form also has to be valid measuring exactly what it should measure.