An HTML analyzer for the study of web usability

This paper presents an HTML analyzer for the study of Web usability. The analyzer parses HTML code in order to extract usability information from Web pages. For usability aspects that can be analyzed automatically, the analyzer draws conclusions and offers suggestions. For more subjective usability issues, it assists the expert by presenting relevant information in a convenient way. Many similar applications exist, but they mostly focus on well-known usability problems and pay little attention to subtler aspects. More alarmingly, they suffer from basic usability problems. Our results show that our analyzer examines several usability aspects - related to ease of navigation, understandability, flexibility, and compatibility - that are generally ignored by the other tools.