European Journal of Higher Education IT 2017-1

Having recognized the need for a national digital asset management infrastructure, SRCE –  University of Zagreb University Computing Centre in association with a number of research and higher education institutions in Croatia built a national repository system called DABAR –  Digital academic archives and repositories. DABAR provides research and higher education institutions with the common infrastructure necessary to establish a secure, reliable and interoperable institutional repositories in a simple way. Dabar allows institutions to manage their digital assets without the need to deal with technical issues related to the implementation and maintenance of digital repositories.

Until the middle of March 2017, DABAR was used to build two national repositories and 109 repositories of Croatian research and higher education institutions. Currently, it supports curation of electronic theses and dissertations, and papers published in electronic journals. The support for conference papers, book chapters, artistic works (photographs and other audio-visual objects) is being actively developed and a plan to build a support for managing research data sets and educational resources is in place.

The DABAR platform and the community gathered around it are actively promoting Open Access to the results of research and to educational modules and resources.

If the company doesn’t have a website, it is losing out on great opportunities for its business. A website itself can be used to accomplish many different marketing strategies to help the business grow. Companies can benefit from having a website. Websites are nowadays used not only as a sales method and information tool, but also as a communication tool in marketing. (Kvasnicova, Kremenova, Fabus, 2015)

Schools and universities have a special place in the market. They offer education opportunities in particular areas. The educational institutions market is huge and extremely competitive. Although the reputation and the quality of institutions is a major advantage, they must think about the target group, who are young people spending several hours per day browsing websites. Schools and universities should have their own web pages, which represent them and perform many functions: information, communication, publications, cultural, and social, among other activities. University websites are intended for employees, high school students interested in studying, school partners, public authorities and the general public. (Kvasnicova, Kremenova, 2015)

The most important is that the web pages are usable – it means it is easy to use the website, user find what are looking for. Otherwise, visitors leave them and click on the competitor’s website.

The word usability has become the most inflected in the design and management of web sites and applications worldwide in recent years. Nielsen (1993) defined usability as a quality attribute – something that is easy to use.

We are able to evaluate the usability. One of the common tool is System Usability Scale (SUS), which provides a “quick and dirty”, reliable tool for measuring the usability. (Brooke, 2013) It consists of a 10 item questionnaire with five response options for respondents; from strongly agree to strongly disagree. Originally created by John Brooke in 1986, it allows us to evaluate a wide variety of products and services, including hardware, software, mobile devices, websites and applications.

We examined how the current situation in Slovakia is. There are no statistics for measuring and evaluating the usability of university websites. To fill this information gap, we conducted several interviews with administrators of schools websites. The interviews have shown that such a usability test have not been made. Therefore we formulated the research problem: Usability evaluation of universities websites and decided to find out the current situation. Research determine how many of universities in selected countries (Slovakia, Czech Republic and Finland) evaluate the usability of their web pages. We expect: More than 90% of schools do not evaluate the usability of their web pages.

Due to the existence of information gaps and our concern for them to be completed, it was a plan of the research project in two main steps. Step 1: We ask administrators from all universities and colleges in 3 selected countries to fill in a questionnaire. The main question will answer our research problem.

Step 2: We ask high school students to evaluate university websites by using SUS tool. The period of our research is from beginning of February to the end of May 2017.

The results offer insight into the current state of usability of universities website in selected countries. We can identify the weaknesses of websites and propose to remove them. Thanks to the results we are be able to improve website usability, make it more comfortable and easier for users.