Teachers' Website Design Experiences and Usability Test: The Case of weebly.com

Abstract

This study was conducted in order to examine the process that the teachers designed the website. For this purpose, www.weebly.com, which is used as a web site building tool, was selected and teachers were given tasks for web designing. In this process, eye and mouse movements of teachers were recorded and analyzed via eye tracking devices. Comparative Static Group Pattern was determined as the research model. The participants were divided into groups formed by random assignment as experiment (N=15) and control group (N=15). This study was carried out in the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory. Experiments were designed differently for experiment and control groups. Before performing the tasks, an introduction video was shown to the experiment group. All participants were instructed about the tasks to complete in order and expected to perform them. Then, interview questions about the contribution of introduction videos and usability of website were asked. According to the results, weebly.com web site is very useful for building an educational web site for teachers. The group that watched the introduction video completed the tasks in a shorter time than the group who did not watch the videos. At the same time, the group who watched introduction videos before using the site was able to complete more tasks than the group that did not watch the videos. These results show that the use of introduction videos as a navigation facilitator enhances the usability.

Keywords: Website design experience, teacher education, usability, eye tracking