An Investigation into Usability of Certain Web Applications and Web Cloud Services

Abstract

In this competitive business world, web applications and web cloud services have gained huge popularity and provide enormous facilities to meet a specific set of objectives for any organization or institution. These Internet based services are considered as the medium for sharing of information, storing of huge resources without buying the underlying infrastructure, respond to user demands and offers better and faster services to users. Websites are considered as the broader view of web applications and vital aspect of organization s competitiveness. In addition to visual esthetics, usability of a website is a strong determinant for user s satisfaction and pleasure. Cloud computing environment gains huge popularity because of offering resources through different services which render numerous benefits to users. To perceive the immense benefits of web cloud services and provide user satisfaction, usability investigation is a crucial requirement. Usability is an essential non-functional quality attribute which helps in carrying out tasks efficiently, effectively and provides user satisfaction. newlineWe have investigated the usability of some academic websites and few cloud services. Academic websites are considered as the source of information and knowledge for all groups of users. Getting the appropriate information at the right time with less effort is the main concern of users. Interview and Questionnaire method is adopted as a usability evaluation methodology for collecting user feedback. The obtained feedback is used to find out the ASQ score and WAMMI score which gives the overall usability score of the websites. To provide the significance of the score obtained, an analysis has been done using statistical approach which includes T-test, ANOVA test and Correlation analysis. Viewing the importance of usability and its necessity for websites, we have carried out the usability investigation using Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) algorithm namely Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to measure the usability score. The process includes identification of usability attributes and sub-attributes which are related to features and characteristics of websites and gathering user feedback on these attributes using Interview and Questionnaire method. Comparison analysis of the outcome of statistical approach and MCDM approach has been carried out which shows the consistency of the results and put significant insight to the study. newlineMoving towards Cloud Computing Environment, cloud services gain huge popularity because of its infrastructure less, scalable and on-demand service facility to users. Maintaining the quality of web cloud services and to provide user satisfaction we have performed usability investigation of some Platformas- a-Service (PaaS) providers. The investigation involves measuring the performance based on some performance metrics and finding out the user satisfaction of cloud services using usability attributes. Moreover, we have also carried out usability investigation on some Storage-as-a-Service (StaaS) providers which are the fundamental block of Infrastructure cloud that fulfills user s excess demand for elastic computing resources. The experiment involves identification of criteria and sub-criteria which are related to cloud storage. User feedback is collected using Interview and Questionnaire method which involves gathering response corresponding to each sub-criteria. Analysis of user feedback is done using fuzzy logic (namely TFN) to remove human vagueness and calculates satisfaction degree of cloud storage services using the AHP method. newline newline