Evaluating the usability of homestay websites in Malaysia using automated tools / Muchlisah Md Yusoff

There are many usability testing have been held on websites such as the higher educational website (Marzanah, et. Al., 2013), e-government portal (Hilman,2008), e-commerce website, etc.. However, there is no study has been done in evaluating the usability of a homestay website. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the usability of homestay websites in Malaysia by using automated tools and to provide recommendations that can be used by the web developer to improve the website. This study has evaluated 347 homestay websites in Malaysia from the Cari Homestay portal website by using several automated tools known as Web Page Analyzer 0.98, Dead Link Checker, Google Back Link Checker Tool and Check My Colours based on some usability criteria by referring to Nielsen and the ISO guidelines. Result of this study has shown that majority of homestay websites in Malaysia have usability issues such as violation of usability guidelines in terms of page size (93.7%), broken links (66.3%), colour failures (98.3%), backlinks (54.8%),download times for modem speed 14.4k, 28.8k, 33.6k, 56k and 128k are more than90%). While for modem speed of 1.44Mbps, the violated download times which are more than 10 seconds is 60.2%. Future research can be done by getting related articles from overseas and automated tools used must have no limitation.