Assessing the Usability for Arabic Language Websites

With increasing reliance on web-based services by today's customer, organizations continuously invest time and money to provide better experience to their customers. Usability studies are very important to assure that customer expectations are achieved effectively and efficiently. The aspect of usability becomes even more important in a multilingual society. The aim of this research is to evaluate usability standards for Arabic and determine if these standards are different from English. A case study involving a Dubai Municipality website has been used to identify the differences between the two languages. A usability test was developed which was divided into two parts: a usability experiment and an online questionnaire. A total of 30 evaluators were chosen for the test. T-tests were conducted for each of the 10 tasks performed during the experiment. The evaluator questionnaire was used after the experiment to obtain the evaluators' feedback. In terms of design, websites in Arabic and English have the same look and feel. In terms of information content, the English content was more usable than Arabic. The research concluded with recommendations to improve the content of the Arabic website.