Heuristic Usability Evaluation of University of Hong Kong Libraries' Mobile Website

Abstract

As mobile technology grows rapidly, more and more students use mobile devices for educational purposes. Under this circumstance libraries, especially academic libraries, should try to expand their services and design mobile websites to meet users' needs. The history of mobile library websites is relatively short, especially in Asia. Usability evaluation of mobile library websites is a new issue for study. As such, this paper evaluates the usability of the University of Hong Kong Library (HKUL) mobile website as a case study by benchmarking against two other universities (the Harvard University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong), according to the ten usability heuristics developed by Nielsen (1994). The evaluation result shows that the mobile website contains some usability issues in 5 heuristics, such as unable to inform users the waiting time, some information not provided in a logical way, some consistency problems in displaying contents, lack of advanced searching for expert users, and inadequate helpful error message. The weakness found in this way provides useful hints in making improvement to mobile website. The design of the HKUL mobile website is quite similar to other mobile library websites, and thus, the results are quite useful for many other academic libraries.