Abstract:
Nowadays, Web-Usability is becoming of paramount important to various organizations all over the world in carrying out their academic and non- academic activities at affordable cost, irrespective of distance, time or location. In spite of this, web designers and developers do not take into consideration socio demographic background of various website users, who happen to come from different parts of the world with different socio-cultural demographic background. In line with this shortcoming, the need to harmonize these differences into one perception is of great concern to the web designers, developers in general and website users in particular. In our efforts to carry out this investigation, in connection to the earmarked field, this study finds it imperative to look into non-functional requirements in designing and developing any system in general and usability factors in particular. As such, this research narrows its investigation to the usability factors subjected to Learning Management System (LMS) of University Putra Malaysia (UPM). This research further investigates how different users from different background of different ages, gender, internet experience, and faculty perceive the usability of UPM: LMS from 376 students’ perspectives. This is achieved by employing WAMMI-Nielsen usability questionnaire. In addition, this research proposed a new UPM: LMS that was subjected through post- test and expert evaluation. It was found that, there is improvement in fitting the said difference users’ perceptions into one particularly user with different age. Different internet experience of users was found to be the common factor that needs to be considered between both the existing and the proposed UPM: LMS.
Keywords: e-learning; comparative analysis; socio- demography; universities; perception.
