Usability Evaluation Methods for a Scientific Internet Information Portal

Sharing information is important for the scientific community. Over the years the internet became the main information source due to its actuality, interactivity and flexibility. While the amount of available data grows, especially non-profit scientific internet pages often lack the user friendliness known from commercial offers, sometimes they also fail to focus on the users' needs. To analyze and improve the attractiveness of internet pages it became common to apply methods of usability engineering. But as it requires a certain amount of work it is usually done in 'big scale' for commercial offers. In this paper we would like to demonstrate the evaluation of a non-commercial scientific information internet portal using methods of usability engineering. For this an online User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ) in combination with web traffic analysis was used. We also would like to outline the experience made during the evaluation process, as well as some of the results.