Improving usability of web systems with similar business objectives

Large web systems are being made so complex that often the users have to make excessive amount of navigational efforts to complete their tasks. This inflicts heavy navigational burden upon users, thus seriously damaging usability of the web based systems. In this paper, we present findings from our recent empirical study of the websites for usability improvement of the web based systems. Our findings are based on the analysis of an experimental data obtained from the prospective students who were invited to interact with the websites of few world class universities to perform a information search task. The data collected in first phase allows us to determine that despite active research in the area of usability engineering, the users still experience heavy 'navigational burden' while performing same task using similar systems. Based on this analysis we proposed to resort to 'Generic Information Architecture' as a standard for organizations in public domain serving similar functions such as universities, hospitals etc. In the second phase, to support our idea, we developed artificial websites (with minimal content and no functionalities) for these universities with generic information architecture and repeated the same experiment. We allowed the prospective students to access these artificial sites from our experimental site. In this paper we report the results from the second phase. Comparing results with those of first phase we observed dramatic improvement in the usability. This work shows the strength of the generic-ness of the information architecture and demonstrates extraordinary improvement in the usability of the web systems which serve similar business objectives.