FORE School of Management

BUSINESS RESEARCH
METHODS

PROJECT REPORT

Research-Based Web Design &

Usability Guidelines

Submitted To:
Prof. Sanjay Rastogi

Submitted By:
FMG 26 - A (Group 6)

Abhay Bansal 261005 Pankaj Patesh 261035

Jagrit Biswas 261025 Saurabh Jha 261053
Nishant Jindal 261032
 Contents

Introduction..........................................................................................................................3

Problem Statement ...............................................................................................................4

Decision Statement ...............................................................................................................4

Literature Review .................................................................................................................5

Research Objectives ..............................................................................................................9

Sub-objectives .......................................................................................................................................... 9

Research Hypothesis .............................................................................................................9

Variables ............................................................................................................................ 11

Research Methodology........................................................................................................ 11
Data Analysis Plan .............................................................................................................. 12

Regression Results .............................................................................................................. 13

Managerial Implications ..................................................................................................... 13

Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 14

References .......................................................................................................................... 15
Questionnaire ........................................................................................................................................ 16

Accessibility ............................................................................................................................................ 16
Navigation .............................................................................................................................................. 16

Design ..................................................................................................................................................... 17

Content ................................................................................................................................................... 17

Security ................................................................................................................................................... 17

Other Technical Considerations ............................................................................................................ 18

Other Marketing Considerations ........................................................................................................... 18

Legal Stuff/Re-Assurance/Legitimization.............................................................................................. 19
Introduction

Identifying and implementing best practice design principles in World Wide Web pages
has been and continues to be a difficult task for web developers. 'While anyone can
create a web page just as anyone can write a poem or build a house, not everyone can do
it well’.
The Website design and development Guidelines would be to assist those involved in the creation
of Websites to base their decisions on the most current and best available evidence. The Guidelines
are particularly relevant to the design of information-oriented sites, but can be applied across a
wide spectrum of Websites.

 Who Are the Guidelines for?

The primary audiences for the Guidelines are Web site managers, designers, and others involved
in the creation or maintenance of Web sites.

A secondary audience is researchers who investigate Web design issues. This resource will help
researchers determine what research has been conducted, and where little or no research exists.

 Why Were the Guidelines Created?

1. Translating the latest Web design research into a practical, easy-to-use format is
essential to the effective design of numerous Websites.
2. To provide quantified, peer-reviewed Web site design guidelines. Most Webites are
lacking key information needed to be effective.

For example, many websites which are being developed are based on guideline sets:

 Just based on the personal opinions of a few experts;

 Do not provide references to support them;

 Do not provide any indication as to whether a particular guideline represents a consensus

of researchers, or if it has been derived from a one-time, non-replicated study; and
Problem Statement
E-commerce businesses are working to capture the market share by offering innovative online
solutions to the customers, still the adoption rate is lower than what was anticipated by them.

Decision Statement
In order to discover the impact of different usability parameters for designing a website on the
footfall of online visitors to the website.
Literature Review
What is usability?
Usability, or User Experience, is the art of making your website simple, user-friendly and easy to
use. Understanding your customer’s online behaviour gives you insight into what works and what
doesn't. One of the best books on Usability is entitled Don’t Make me think by Steve Krug. The
title spells out the rule of thumb when designing websites – make it effortless for your users, and
they will stay; make it difficult, and they will leave. Some of the most basic and proven usability
tips include proper use of taglines, intuitive navigation, concise content, and strategic use of
visuals. Avoid confusing features or functionality. Do links and buttons appear clickable, as they
should? Does the website flow logically? Is it abundantly clear where important information can
be found? If not, your website has not been designed for usability.

Why is usability important?

Research conducted by HubSpot.com reveals that when asked about the most important factor in
a website, over 75% of respondents stated they rank ease of finding the information at the top. If
you construct your website in a manner that’s too complicated to navigate, produce content too
difficult to comprehend, or design functionality too cumbersome to use, your website will not meet
its objectives, and you will lose business.
Usability is one of the most important characteristics of any user interface and is a measure of how
easy the interface is to use (Nielsen, 2003). Researchers have stressed the importance of making
e-commerce sites usable and have stated that good usability is not a luxury but an essential
characteristic if a site is to survive (Nielsen and Norman, 2000). Usability evaluation methods can
be categorised by how the usability problems are identified, for example by users, evaluators or
tools. User-based usability evaluation methods: This category includes a set of methods that
involves users in the process of identifying usability problems. The user testing method is the most
common approach in this category. Evaluator-based usability evaluation methods: This category
includes usability methods that involve evaluators in the process of identifying usability problems.
The most common method in this category is heuristic evaluation. Software-based usability
evaluation methods: This category involves software tools in the process of identifying usability
problems. An example of this approach is web analytics. Web analytics is an approach that
involves collecting, measuring, monitoring, analysing and reporting web usage data to understand
visitors’ experiences (McFadden, 2005). User- and evaluator-based approaches have been
frequently used to evaluate the usability of ecommerce websites. However, little research has
employed web analytic tools in the evaluation of such sites. The research described here aims to
address this gap and presents a methodological framework which outlines how each of three
methods could be used in the most effective manner for evaluating the usability of e-commerce
sites. This paper is organised as follows: Section 2 reviews related work, Section 3 describes web
metrics and provides an example of a web analytics tool, Section 4 presents the aims and objectives
of this research, Section 5 describes the methods used, Section 6 presents the main results, Section
7 illustrates the framework and finally, Section 8 presents some conclusions.

USABILITY EVALUATION OF E-COMMERCE WEBSITES

Only a few studies were found in the literature that evaluated the usability of e-commerce sites.
Tilson et al.’s study (1998) is one that involved users in evaluating the usability of e-commerce
websites. The researchers asked sixteen users to complete tasks on four e-commerce websites and
report what they liked and disliked. Another study, conducted by Freeman and Hyland (2003), also
involved users in evaluating the usability of e-commerce sites, in this case three supermarket sites.
These studies proved the usefulness of user-based methods in identifying major design problems
which prevent users from interacting with the sites successfully. Chen and Macredie (2005)
involved evaluators using the heuristic method to evaluate the usability of four online
supermarkets. The results demonstrated the usefulness of the heuristic evaluation method
regarding its ability to identify a large number of usability problems on the sites. Barnard and
Wesson (2004) employed both heuristic evaluation and user testing methods together to identify
usability problems on ecommerce sites in South Africa. Significant usability problems were
identified based only on the common usability problems that were identified by both the user
testing and heuristic evaluation methods.

WEB METRICS AND GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Web metrics are employed to give meaning to web traffic data collected by web analytics tools.
Web metrics can be placed into two categories: basic and advanced. Basic metrics are raw data
which are usually expressed in raw numbers (i.e. visits). Advanced metrics are metrics which are
expressed in rates, ratios, percentages or averages instead of raw numbers, and are designed to
guide actions to optimise online business. Inan (2006) and Phippen et al. (2004) criticised the use
of basic metrics to measure the traffic of websites. Instead, they suggest using advanced metrics.
An example of a web analytics tool is Google Analytics. Google Analytics (GA) was released to
the public in August 2006 as a free analytics tool. At least two studies have recognised the
appearance of GA software and used this tool to evaluate and improve the design of web sites (a
library web site and an archival services web site) (Fang, 2007; Prom, 2007). However, these
studies used the standard reports from GA (i.e., content by titles, landing pages) without deriving
specific metrics. These studies suggested that the GA’s reports enable problems to be identified
quickly (Fang, 2007; Prom, 2007). The literature outlined above indicates that there has been a
lack of research that evaluates the usability of e-commerce websites by employing user-based,
evaluator-based and software-based (GA) usability evaluation methods together. Studies by Fang
(2007) and Prom (2007) have illustrated the potential usefulness of using GA to evaluate websites
with the intention of improving their usability. However, there is a lack of research to illustrate the
value of using GA for evaluating the usability of e-commerce websites by employing advanced
web metrics. Furthermore, it is clear from the literature that there is a lack of research that
compares user testing and heuristic evaluation methods for identifying detailed types of specific
usability problems found on e-commerce websites.
Some of the parameters to Evaluate E-Commerce Websites are
 Homepage

 Navigation

 Search tool

 On-site content

 Product pages

 Checkout design
Research Objectives
Following are the objectives:
 To determine website usability parameters that influences the decision of visiting a website.
 To determine on which factors a web designer should focus to increase their visitor footfall.

Sub-objectives

 To determine if it is viable to go for a mobile site or a mobile application in order to

increase the footfall of visitors.
 To determine if the focus should be more on frontend design or the backend
performance of the website.

Research Hypothesis
H1: The decision to opt for third party delivery services does not depend on whether the
restaurant is fast food, casual dining, or fine dining

The decision to opt for 3rd party delivery services depends on the kind of restaurant. As per our
hypothesis, the chances of restaurants which are fast food or casual dining are more open to avail
3rd party delivery service than restaurants which are fine dining.

H2: The decision to outsource does not depend on the cost effectiveness of outsourcing
delivery services over setting up own delivery service

This hypothesis states that there is a relationship between the cost of setting up own delivery
services and cost of outsourcing them to third party vendors. If the cost proposed in the quotation
of third party vendors is less, then setting up own delivery services would be a beneficial option
to go for.

H3: The decision to outsource does not depend on the degree of promotion the third-party
vendors are bringing for the restaurant/food joints.
We have hypothesized that the amount promotion by the third-party vendors through their order
receiving application with various discounts and coupons becomes a factor of consideration while
a restaurant’/food joint decides to tie up with a particular company.

H4: The decision to outsource does not depend on the effectiveness of handling orders by the
third-party vendors

The hypothesis is that how effectively and efficiently the third-party vendors’ runner boys handles
the orders becomes a factor of consideration for the restaurants/food joints to judge the reliability
of the third-party home delivery vendors.

H5: The decision to outsource does not depend on the on-time delivery promise of third party
vendor for each order

This hypothesis states that the vendor’s efficiency to deliver the orders within the prescribed time
is also an important factor with some restaurant/food joints whose quality of food depends on how
fast the food is consumed.

H6: The decision to outsource does not depend on the availability of runner boys with the
third-party vendor

This hypothesis states that the availability of runner boys with third party vendor is an important
factor for restaurants.

H7: The decision to outsource does not depend on the area covered by the third-party vendor

This hypothesis states that the delivery area covered by the vendor is also an important factor with
restaurant/food joints.

H8: The decision to outsource does not depend on volume of home delivery orders received
by the restaurants

This hypothesis states that the volume of home delivery orders is also an important factor for
restaurant/food joints to consider before going for third-party delivery service.
Variables
 Cost effectiveness and efficiency of time.
 Volume of home-delivery orders
 Promotion
 Availability of runner boy
 Area covered
 Effective handling of large orders
 Type of restaurants

Research Methodology
To research about this situation and to collect the relevant data to analyze for coming up to proper
inferences we have undertaken the Survey Questionnaire technique. A small easily
understandable Questionnaire was developed for decoding the relationship between the dependent
and independent variables developed comprising of 9 questions’ that aimed at capturing the
relationship between different variables and checking the validity of hypothesis proposed.

Appendix 1: Survey Questionnaire

Sampling

As the population of the data is huge and diversified, we conducted the survey with the help of a
sample population. The sample collection technique that is used is Stratifies Sample collection
technique. Under this technique, divides the population into groups and randomly selects
subsamples from each group. Variations include proportional, disproportional and optimal
allocation of subsample sizes. In this case, all the restaurants/food joints into 3 categories:

 Fine Dining
 Casual Dining
 Fast Food
Data Analysis Plan
We have collected data from three types of restaurants as already mentioned earlier on several
survey questions (refer to appendix). The data is collected from 40 different types of restaurants
in Delhi- NCR region. The data analysis plan is as:
1. Data Refining: Due to language barrier, we had to ask many indirect questions to get answer
to actual survey questions and then extract the need part and fair the answers separately.
2. Feeding and compilation of the data into IBM-SPSS data sheet: To analyze the data
collected it was fed into SPSS data sheet with appropriate data type.
3. Selection of a regression technique: Since the data collected was on Likert scale other than
some of the direct question so we had decided to go for multi-linear regression to find the
impact of various factors on the decision of going for a third-party delivery partner.
4. Designing of dummy variables: As some of the variables like type of restaurants and volume
of home delivery orders were ordinal in nature so could not be used in doing linear regression.
To include them in the regression analysis those variables were changed into dummy
variables.
5. Setting up of regression inputs: Dependent and independent variable were decided and along
with that another option of different statistics like descriptive statistics, Durbin-Watson,
collinearity diagnostics, and some plots were selected. The Backward stepwise regression
method was selected.
Regression Results
Various tables and plots are generated such as Descriptive Statistics Table, Correlations Table,
Model Summary, ANOVA Table, Regression coefficients, Residual Statistics, and Histogram of
Regression standardized residuals. These various results were used in different interpretations.
(Refer to Appendix 2)

Highlights of result

 Adjusted R squared = 0.559

 Not multicollinearity among IVs
 Durbin-Watson = 2.196 (Less chances of auto-correlation in data.
 Relevant IVs: Promotion, Area_covered, Between30And50, Avail_runner_boy,
On_time_delivry, MoreThan50

Managerial Implications
1. Restaurant owners planning to opt for 3rd party delivery service can use this analysis to
support their decision.

2. 3rd party delivery service providers can also use this analysis to know the factors that are more
significant and try to improve those aspects of their business.

3. Limitations: The sample collected consists of restaurants on Delhi NCR region only. Thus,
this analysis cannot be used in other regions.
 Conclusion

• Fast food restaurants are more likely to use the service than the other two.

• Restaurants propensity to use the service increases with the increase in % takeaway orders.

• Restaurants with proportion of home delivery orders in total orders greater than 50% are more
likely to use the service the propensity to use increase directly with increase in order value.

• Regression equation:

𝑂𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑥𝑝 = 0.38 + 0.402 ∗ (𝐵𝑒𝑡𝑤𝑒𝑒𝑛 30 𝑎𝑛𝑑 50) + 0.252 ∗ (𝑂𝑛_𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒_𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑦) +

0.201 ∗ (𝐴𝑣𝑎𝑖𝑙_𝑟𝑢𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑟_𝑏𝑜𝑦) + 0.332 ∗ (𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑚𝑜𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛) + 0.213 ∗ (𝐴𝑟𝑒𝑎_𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑) +
0.436 ∗ (𝑀𝑜𝑟𝑒𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑛50)

• The IV FastFood, LessThan30, CasualDining, Effectv_handling, FineDining, Cost_effectv

have insignificant impact on the DV.
• All the significant IVs have almost same impact on the DV which suggest that third-party
delivery partner need to take care of all the parameters instead of focusing on any parameter.
References

http://www.dlsu.edu.ph/conferences/dlsu-research-congress-proceedings/2017/SEE/SEE-I-
013.pdf, accessed on 08th March 2018

https://www.usability.gov/sites/default/files/documents/guidelines_book.pdf, accessed on 09th

March,2018
 Questionnaire

Accessibility

1. Is content structurally separate from navigational elements?

2. Is the website optimized for mobile?

3. How compliant is the website with W3C coding standards? Valid HTML/CSS?

4. Are ‘alt’ tags in place on all significant images?

5. Are text-based alternatives in place to convey essential information if this is featured within
images or multimedia files?

Navigation

1. Are links labeled with anchor text that provides a clear indication of where they lead without
over using exact match anchor text?

2. Depth – what is the maximum number of clicks it takes to reach a page within the depths of the
site?

3. Does any part of your site use Flash?

4. Responsive to click feedback – Is a response given immediately (0.1 seconds) after a click is
made on a hyperlink?

5. Do clickable items stylistically indicate that they are clickable?

6. How intuitive is it to navigate? Are signs obvious or obscured?

7. Is it readable? Consider typeface, font size, color contrast.

8. Is there a clear statement of PURPOSE of the site? The purpose must be clear within a few
seconds.

9. Do you have a clear call to action on each page?

10. Is a logical site map available?, If not, is a keyword-based search feature available? Note: Large
(multi-thousands of pages) sites should have a search form.
 Design

1. Is the site’s design aesthetically appealing?

2. Are the colors used harmoniously and logically related?

3. Are the color choices visually accessible? (For example high enough in contrast to assist the
colorblind and visually impaired in reading the site appropriately)

4. Is the design audience appropriate?- The standard text size should be readable for visitors who
don’t know how to adjust their browsers.

5. Are the fonts easy to read on various screen resolutions?

Content

1. Is the website copy succinct but informative?

2. Does the copywriting style suit the website’s purpose and ‘speak’ to its target audience?

3. Are bodies of text broken into easy to read chunks?

4. Can text be resized through the browser or do CSS settings restrict size alteration?

5. Is the contrast between text and its background color sufficient to make reading easy on the
eyes?

6. Is text broken into small, readable chunks and highlighted using headings, sub-headings, and
emphasize features where appropriate to assist in skimming?

7. Within articles, are there links to more detailed explanations of subjects, or definitions of
jargon terms?

8. Do you have an “about page” that identifies the author of the content, credits to source for
content that was not written by the site owner himself?

9. Do you have testimonials and publish them on the site?

10. Do you update the content regularly and don’t live by the phrase “set it and forget it”?

Security
1. Any obvious security flaws?

2. How resilient are forms to special characters?

3. Are private directories password protected via .htaccess?

4. Are public non-document directories (cgi-bin, images, etc) indexable or are blank index.html
pages or appropriate permission settings in place to block access?

5. Is customer data stored online? If so, is this database appropriately safeguarded against
external access?

Other Technical Considerations

1. Does the site load quickly – even (especially) for mobile users?

2. Are all links (internal and external) valid and active?

3. Are scripts free from errors?

4. Is the website free from server side errors?

Other Marketing Considerations

1. Is the website properly optimized for search engines (essential text emphasized, title tags
relevant, title text presented in H1, outbound links reliable and contextually related, etc.)

2. Does the index page entice a visitor deeper into the site or shopping cart?

3. Does the website contain elements designed to encourage future or viral visitation (i.e. a
contest, newsletter, tell-a-friend feature, and forum with a subscription option, downloadable
toolbar, RSS feed or similar)?

4. Are robots.txt configured correctly?

5. Site Map available?

6. Is every page accessible at least via a single plain HTML Link (no JavaScript or Flash Link)?

7. Does every page have at least some text in the content? (How much text remains on the page if
you remove all Images, Videos, Flash, Java Applets and JavaScript Code? Anything? Does the
remainder still state the page’s purpose?)
8. Is every individual page only accessible via a single URL or are several URLs available (and
worse, used) to access the same page? Consider duplicate content issue and utilize canonical
URLs.

Legal Stuff/Re-Assurance/Legitimization

1. Did you include a Contact Us page with real address, phone number (toll-free for businesses)
and contact form or email available, basically a clear and easy to use feedback/contact
mechanism?

2. DMCA Notice up? Terms of Use page available where you specify what you do and why and
what visitors have to agree on if they want to use your site? This is to protect yourself from
complaints or worse regarding things that you cannot control properly, such as links to third-
party websites or ads from automated systems such as Google AdSense, etc.

3. Privacy Policy up (especially if you collect data, email, names, and web analytics tracking
cookies)?