A Statistical Analysis Examining The Usability Of Community College Online Admissions Applications
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Date
2017
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Community College Leadership Program
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Doctor of Education
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This item is made available by Morgan State University for personal, educational, and research purposes in accordance with Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Other uses may require permission from the copyright owner.
Abstract
Community colleges offer online admissions applications as a way for students to apply conveniently for admission, yet the experience associated with the use of these applications has not been fully explored. Hence, the purpose of this parametric quantitative study was to examine the usability of community college online admissions applications by employing Jakob Nielsen's Ten Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design and the System Usability Scale (SUS). An additional goal of the study was to determine if the usability of community college online admissions applications varied by the region in which the community college was located. Nielsen's usability heuristics (1995) provided a concrete framework for examining community college online admissions application usability and were tied to the questions in the SUS. Hence, usability was qualified with Nielsen's heuristics and quantified with the score generated by the SUS. The SUS, a ten-item questionnaire developed by John Brooke in 1986 (Brooke, 2013) that is still applicable to modern systems and applications (Bangor, Kortum, & Miller, 2008; Sauro, 2011), is used to gauge user satisfaction with software systems and applications. The SUS was completed after the researcher filled in each of the online admissions applications for community colleges on the East Coast and in the South (n = 62). The researcher visited each website of the community colleges, filled in each online admissions application, and completed the SUS to generate a usability score. To address the three research questions, one sample t-tests were used. One-sample t-tests were applied to determine how usable the community college online admissions applications were in comparison to an established SUS benchmark score of 68, which represented average usability.