OTTI 2007

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About the research

The Internet has emerged as a powerful tool, interwoven with the fabric of every day business practice. Travel and Tourism companies face many challenges in realising the full potential of this dynamic medium to deliver quality information, communications and services to ever growing numbers of diverse users.

The research seeks to recognise and encourage innovation and sound user-centric thinking among those responsible for the development of company websites. It will set the benchmarks in practice, uncovering trends, conventions and plain good ideas. Ultimately it seeks to be a resource and reference point for the Internet in the South African Travel & Tourism Industry, increasing awareness of the value of the Internet for the Industry, not only for themselves, but also as ambassadors for South Africa in the global business community.

The research employs a user-centric approach for the evaluation of the online channel. It holds that in the final analysis if the website does not work for the user it simply does not work. It is not strictly a design evaluation, nor does it evaluate the quality of the content provided alone, rather it analyses how these can contribute to the quality of the user's experience.

Evaluation method

The research is being conducted by BlueRiverStone. The method that we use to do the website and email responsiveness assessment is a scenario-based heuristic, and was developed and tested over three years in conjunction with Dr Andrew Thatcher at The University of the Witwatersrand. This method, while not a complete usability assessment, allows us to compare on relatively objective criteria many websites from the user's perspective and forms a natural starting point in the design/redesign cycle.

In brief, a heuristic (or score sheet) is developed to measure a user's interaction with the website given a defined scenario of use. The heuristic has been validated by the panel of experts before we apply it with trained evaluators in a controlled environment.

There are three components to the evaluation

• Firstly a technical quality evaluation using a browser-based client side website validating and testing tool called eValid.
• Secondly there is a website usability analysis. Trained evaluators score website and webpage navigability to important pieces of content, they evaluate dynamic functionality, professionalism and a range of other features relevant to the scenario.
• Thirdly email enquiries are sent and responses evaluated against an email score sheet.

Review Panel

In setting up the research it has been of paramount concern for us to ensure that we have a well rounded panel of independent domain experts who will inform and validate our metrics.