Modelling Websites Navigation Elements According to Usability Aspects

Nowadays, more and more users and companies have used the Internet to commercial, educational and entertainment purposes. Since the success of Internet enterprises depends on the usability of services offered on Websites, it is important that the Web pages follow usability principles. To evaluate usability of existing Websites, one can perform tests and analysis, mainly based on Nielsen´s heuristics (variations of them), using real users and/or models. Due to the facts that today Websites have a short-time of life and the information inside them are more complex, providing models amendable to usability analysis becomes crucial to respect the time-to-market and quality of new Websites. Diverse representations of sites can be given, depending on the tests and analysis one wants to carry out. In this paper, we propose a framework for the Websites elementary navigation elements and relate them to usability principles, identifying which elements are necessary for a set of usability analysis based on Nielsen´s heuristics. The model aims to characterize Websites (pages) focusing on usability and the tasks users can perform during the navigation.