Comparing Usability Standards for Arabic and English
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Date
2007-01
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Publisher
British University in Dubai
Abstract
Users from all over the globe are attracted and use the World Wide Web and the
websites are a new perspective of a truly global medium of communication. All users
regardless of their background and origin should be able to experience the web with
equal results in terms of content impact. Although most websites are in English
today, but there are non-English speaking people living and working around
especially in the Middle East. Therefore, the web should be easily enough to be used,
accessed and understood by all users. The purpose of this research was to compare
usability standards for Arabic and English websites. Dubai Municipality website was
considered as a study case. The research for this paper included an extensive review
of current literature on usability definitions, characteristics and benefits associated
with usability, in addition to the usability criteria and cultural differences. The
literature review also included a detailed description about the Usability Evaluation
Methods, both the Inspection and Testing methods.
Based on the review the usability criteria were determined and the Thinking Aloud
testing method was selected as the usability technique for the research in addition to
questionnaire. A total number of thirty participants, with defined user profile, were
selected to carry out the experiment. The experiment tasks were based on eight
hypotheses which were defined and tested. The experiment included ten scenarios or
“real-life” tasks. On the other hand, the questionnaire subjects were based on
identifying user profile, supporting experiment questions, website navigation,
presentation layer, text size and overall quality.
After analyzing the usability test and questionnaire, the major findings indicate that
English is more practical than Arabic. Where users are more confident browsing the
English version, which means that English website is more usable than Arabic. The
recommendations on the factors which caused the Arabic website to be less usable
than English such as content translation, text size, etc has been identified and steps on
how to make the Arabic more usable has been recommended.
Description
Keywords
Arabic, usability, criteria, cultural markers, localization