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Extending the modified heuristic usability evaluation technique to chain and independent hotel websites
ARTICLE IN PRESS
Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
Research note
Extending the modified heuristic usability evaluation technique to chain and independent hotel websites Tom Au Yeung, Rob Law* School of Hotel & Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Abstract Usability and functionality are the major elements which can significantly affect the performance of a website. While a number of prior studies have investigated the functionality of hotel websites, the usability issue has largely been overlooked in the existing hospitality literature. What is more, there is virtually an entire absence of published articles which compare and contrast website usability between chain and independent hotels. This paper presents a study that applied the modified heuristic evaluation technique to compute Usability Hazards Indices of hotel websites in Hong Kong. Experimental results showed that the hazard indices of chain hotels were significantly lower than the hazards indices of independent hotels. In other words, usability performance of chain hotels was significantly better than that of independent hotels. The possible explanations to this finding are likely due to the difference in financial support and the difference in operating scales between chain and independent hotels. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Website; Usability; Chain hotels; Independent hotels; Hong Kong
1. Introduction Recently the hotel industry has been experiencing a rapid growth of chain properties. Go and Pine (1995) stated that the benefits which chain operations can offer include nationwide advertising and an (inter)national reservations and referral network. Go and Pine (1995) further argued that the trend towards hotel chain affiliation will continue in the future. Similarly, Kotler et al. (1999) stated that the *Corresponding author. Tel.: +852-2766-6349; fax: +852-2362-9362. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (T.Au. Yeung), [email protected] (R. Law). 0278-4319/$ - see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijhm.2003.03.001
ARTICLE IN PRESS 308
T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
present hotel industry is dominated by chains, and these chains are operated in a highly competitive environment where aggressive marketing skills are needed. One of the ways which chain hotels excel independent hotels is through their marketing channel, including the newly emerged online channel on the Internet. Ever since the introduction of the Internet and its associated business applications, hotel managers have been fascinated with the huge potential benefits that the technology can bring to their business. Hence, most chain and independent hotels have established their own websites. Setting up a website is presently affordable as the related costs are not enormously high. Once established, the website allows a hotel to conduct a larger scale of business with a potential worldwide audience. It enables everyone with an Internet connection to access its information, irrespective of geographical location, time zone, or computer system. In other words, the website enables hotel products more accessible to the new marketplace. In spite of the increasing Internet applications to hotels and the growing popularity of hotel chains, published articles in the existing hospitality literature rarely investigated the relationship of chain and independent hotel websites. The absence of prior studies on chain versus independent hotel websites is particularly true in the context of website usability. In other words, chain and independent hotel managers cannot know whether their websites meet the best practice from a design perspective, and therefore, do not have useful information to facilitate continuous improvements. This paper makes an attempt to bridge such a gap in the hospitality literature by incorporating the modified heuristic usability evaluation technique, which was proposed by Au Yeung and Law (2003), into chain and independent hotel websites in Hong Kong, a leading tourist destination in Asia. The usability performance, quantified in numeric Usability Hazards Indices, should benefit hotel managers from better understanding how appealing their websites are, the websites’ inter-category and intra-category performance, and to judge a hotel website’s performance versus its peers.
2. Related work on website usability and functionality Everyone agrees with the importance of Internet applications in the hotel industry. However, the real challenge of Internet commerce in the hotel industry lies in using the technology in a way which ultimately makes business sense (Gilbert et al., 1999). Specifically, hotel managers have to ensure that their websites provide the right content and are usable to users. Many prior studies have been performed to investigate website design and user preference. For instance, Kim and Moon (1998) performed a study which examined how manipulation of different interface design factors could induce customer confidence. Another study performed by Rhodes (1998) suggested that good content, simple design, and few grammatical errors were required to establish website trust, and users tended to trust websites that are more usable. Lu and Yeung (1998) proposed a framework for effective commercial Web applications, and a major component of the effectiveness relates to the usefulness of a website, which further divides into functionality and usability levels. According to
ARTICLE IN PRESS T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
309
Lu and Yeung (1998), usefulness refers to whether a website is helpful to users to accomplish its intended purposes. In the hotel industry, functionality relates to the degree of information provision about the website’s services/products (Chung and Law, 2003; Liang and Law, 2003), whereas usability examines to what extent a website is efficient and enjoyable to use for its products/services being promoted (Au Yeung and Law, 2003). Performing well in functionality does not directly imply that the hotel website is useful to users as usefulness also depends on usability. The ultimate goal of usability is to make a hotel website more efficient and enjoyable for users to experience. Nielsen (2000) proposed that usability should contain five factors, namely easy to learn, efficient to use, easy to remember, few errors and pleasant to use. A few methods to evaluate website usability have been proposed but the most popular method appears to be the heuristic evaluation which was originated from Nielsen (1993). A heuristic evaluation involves the examination of a user interface by a small group of assessors who look for violations of common usability criteria (heuristic). The usability hazards to be identified in a heuristic evaluation can then be tackled immediately, leading to a redesign, or be used for further usability testing. The approach basically involves identifying the usability attributes, gathering opinions about the usability of particular websites, merging and rating the problems that were identified, and finally trying to work towards solutions. During the opinions gathering stage, evaluators are required to score the severity level of each attribute, using a nominal judgmental scale. A value at the low end of the scale usually means that the evaluators do not find a problem. A score at the high end, however, indicates that the concerned attribute shows a catastrophic problem.
3. Methodology 3.1. Questionnaire design and data collection The selected dimensions and their associated attributes mainly followed the questionnaire developed by Au Yeung and Law (2003) for initially testing usability performance among luxury, mid-priced, and economy hotel websites, which was originated from Abeleto (2002). The usability performance of a hotel website, measured by an overall website Usability Hazards Index, is function of the individual performance of five dimensions, and can be computed by a modified heuristic usability evaluation technique. Each dimension comprised multiple attributes, and each attribute stated a specific website usability hazard. Fig. 1 shows the sketch of this usability performance framework. The questionnaire was then completed by a group hotel website users including hotel guests, hotel managers, and IT professionals (thirty in each group). These users actually ranked the importance of all attributes in a dimension. In total, there were 24 attributes in the five dimensions. Specifically, all attributes were ranked from the most offensive practice to the least offensive practice. Respondents were also
ARTICLE IN PRESS 310
T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
Dimension 1: Language Usability
Dimension 2: Layout and Graphics Usability Dimension 3: Information Architecture Usability
Website Usability Performance (Overall Usability Hazards Index)
Dimension 4: User Interface and Navigation Usability Dimension 5: General Usability Fig. 1. A usability performance framework of hotel websites.
requested to weigh the relative importance of responses from each users group so that an Importance Index for each usability attribute within its associated dimension could then be computed. A checklist in a five-point judgemental scale was then developed based on the questionnaire, which was then used by two evaluators to assess the severity of each usability hazard on a specific hotel website. The use of two evaluators to assess each website was to eliminate the possibility of personal bias. In this study, the websites of 77 hotels of the Hong Kong Hotels Association were chosen for analysis. 3.2. Computation of importance index Let c; h; and t be the number of hotel guests, hotel managers, and IT professionals. In addition, let C% r ; H% r ; and T% r be the mean score for the rth attribute ranked by hotel customers, hotel managers, and IT professionals for r ¼ 1; 2; y; n in the n number of attributes within a dimension. Lastly, let Pi ; Qi ; and Ri be the relative importance of responses provided by respondent i in the group of hotel customers, hotel managers, and IT professionals subject to Pi þ Qi þ Ri ¼ 100%: An Importance Index, Ir; of attribute r for r ¼ 1; 2; y:; n can be derived for each usability attribute within its dimension using the following mathematical function: Pm Pm Pm Qi Ri H% r T% r C% r i¼1 Pi i¼1 i¼1 I r ¼ Pn þ Pn þ Pn ; ð1Þ % % % m m m r¼1 Hr r¼1 Tr r¼1 Cr where m is the sum of c; h; and t: The Importance Index of an attribute thus represents its relative importance within a specific dimension, and the sum of the Importance Indices within a
ARTICLE IN PRESS T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
311
dimension equals 1. A checklist for the heuristic evaluation was established based on these Importance Indices. 3.3. Computation of usability hazards index For each hotel website and for each website attribute, a mean rating score was calculated based on the result of group evaluation. The mean rating score for hotel t was then transformed to a Usability Hazards Index, Ht ; t ¼ 1; 2; y; m for m hotel websites, using the following approach: Ur ¼ ðS% r 1ÞIr 5; ð2Þ Di ¼
n X
Ur ;
ð3Þ
Di ;
ð4Þ
r¼1
Ht ¼
5 X i¼1
where n is the number of attributes within a dimension i; i ¼ 1; 2; y; 5; Sr the evaluators’ mean rating score for the rth attribute; r ¼ 1; 2; y; n; Ir the Importance Index of attribute r; r ¼ 1; 2; y; n; Ur the Usability Hazards Index of attribute r; r ¼ 1; 2; y; n; Di the Usability Hazards Index of dimension i; i ¼ 1; 2; y; 5: It should be noted that the value of Usability Hazard Index of each dimension could range from the minimum 0, representing ‘‘no problem found on this dimension’’ to the maximum 20, representing ‘‘destructive problems found on this dimension’’. Adding up the scores in the five dimensions produced the overall Usability Hazards Index of a hotel website in the range of 0 to 100. This overall index then fell into one of the four levels in a conversion table, which was developed on the basis of an equal percentile approach (Liang and Law, 2003). The levels included ‘‘minor problems’’, ‘‘medium problems’’, ‘‘major problems’’, and ‘‘destructive problems’’ found on a website. In this research, the usability performance of a hotel website is measured by the overall Usability Hazards Index of the website.
4. Findings and discussion All websites of the Hong Kong Hotels Association were chosen for examination in this study, which included 50 chain hotels and 27 independent hotels. Table 1 shows the usability performance, measured in Usability Hazards Indices, of chain hotels, independent hotels, and all hotels. The average Usability Hazards Indices of the chain hotels and independent hotels were 17.365 and 23.65 respectively, indicating minor problems were found on the websites. Among the five dimensions, chain hotels performed significantly better than independent hotels in the dimensions of language usability and information architecture usability. In addition, the overall Usability Hazards Indices of chain hotels scored significantly lowered than
ARTICLE IN PRESS 312
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Table 1 Comparison of website Usability Hazards Indices between chain hotels and independent hotels
Dimension 1 total Dimension 2 total Dimension 3 total Dimension 4 total Dimension 5 total Overall Usability Hazards Index
Chain hotels (n ¼ 50)
Independent hotels (n ¼ 27)
All hotels (n ¼ 77)
t
Sig.
1.754 3.996 2.182 4.587 4.847 17.365
3.134 4.928 4.595 5.958 5.036 23.650
2.238 4.323 3.028 5.068 4.913 19.569
2.373 1.280 3.448 1.701 0.182 2.404
0.020 0.204 0.001 0.093 0.856 0.019
Significant at a ¼ 0:05:
independent hotels. This showed that chain hotels performed significantly better than independent hotels in terms of website usability. The significant difference in usability performance can be explained by the difference in financial and technical support between chain and independent hotels. Siguaw et al. (2000) stated that due to the larger amount of financial and human resources from which they can draw, chain hotels are better at disseminating technological information, training employees, and installing computer systems to improve performance. Powers and Barrows (1999) claimed that chains have strengths in six different areas, including marketing and brand recognition, site selection expertise, access to capital, purchasing economies, centrally administered control and information systems, and personnel program development. These all represent economies of scale: the spreading of a centralized activity over a large number of units so that each unit absorbs only a small portion of the cost but all have the benefit of specialized expertise or buying power. Hence, chain hotel websites are able to perform better than independent hotel websites. O’Connor (1999) echoed such a claim, and stated that most chain hotels have a central website which contains a search engine that makes it easy for potential customers to find the products that meet their needs. In contrast, many independent hotel websites tend to contain only static web pages, on which users have to browse through before they can find their needed information.
5. Conclusions and future research This study has extended the modified heuristic usability evaluation technique to compare and contrast the usability performance between chain and independent hotel websites. Experimental results indicate that, due to the strong support and wide operation scale, chain hotels received overall Usability Hazards Indices which were significantly lowered than independent hotels. In other words, the website usability performance of chain hotels was significantly better than their independent counterparts. The industrial implications for chain hotels are, therefore, to spend more effort to improve the attributes that are important but do not significantly
ARTICLE IN PRESS T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
313
outperform independent hotels. For independent hotels, managers should pay attention to the important attributes that are significantly behind chain hotels. After all, usability is largely the experience of users. While the findings of this study appear reasonable, the sample size is far from making any generalizable conclusions. A future study is, therefore, to increase the sample size to investigate hotel website users on their perception of website usability attributes. It would be valuable to develop a generic computation model to quantitatively evaluate the usability of hotel websites.
References Abeleto, 2002. Objective evaluation of likely usability hazards - preliminaries for user testing [Available Online]. http://www.abeleto.com/resources/articles/objective.html. Au Yeung, T., Law, R., 2003. Usability evaluation of Hong Kong hotel websites. In: Frew, A., O’Connor, P., Hitz, M. (Eds.), Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2003. Springer-Verlag, Wien, New York, pp. 261–269. Chung, T., Law, R., 2003. Developing a performance indicator for hotel websites. International Journal of Hospitality Management 22 (1), 119–125. Gilbert, D., Powell-Perry, J., Widijoso, S., 1999. Approaches by hotels to the use of the internet as a relationship marketing tool. Journal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science 5 (1), 21–38. Go, F.M., Pine, R., 1995. Globalization Strategy in the Hotel Industry. Routledge, London. Kim, J., Moon, J.Y., 1998. Designing towards emotional usability in customer interfaces. Interacting with Computers 10 (1), 1–29. Kotler, P., Bowen, J., Makens, J., 1999. Marketing for Hospitality and Tourism. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ. Liang, K., Law, R., 2003. A modified functionality performance evaluation model for evaluating the performance of china based hotel websites. Journal of Academy of Business and Economics 2 (2), 193–208. Lu, M.T., Yeung, W.L., 1998. A framework for effective commercial web application development. Internet Research: Electronic Networking Applications and Policy 8 (2), 166–173. Nielsen, J., 1993. Usability Engineering. Academic Press Professional, Boston. Nielsen, J., 2000. Introduction: why web usability. Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis. O’Connor, P., 1999. Cutting out the middleman! Tourism and the Internet. Electronic Distribution Technology in the Tourism and Hospitality. CABI Publishingm, Wallingford, pp. 97–130. Powers, T., Barrows, C.W., 1999. Introduction to the Hospitality Industry. Wiley, New York. Rhodes, J.S., 1998. How to Gain the Trust of Your Users [Available Online]. http://webword.com/ moving/trust.html. Siguaw, J.A., Enz, C.A., Namasivayam, K., 2000. Adoption of information technology in us hotels: strategically driven objectives. Journal of Travel Research 39 (2), 192–201. Tom Au Yeung is an executive of Grand Hotel Group Limited in Hong Kong. Rob Law is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Hotel & Tourism Management, Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
Research note
Extending the modified heuristic usability evaluation technique to chain and independent hotel websites Tom Au Yeung, Rob Law* School of Hotel & Tourism Management, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Abstract Usability and functionality are the major elements which can significantly affect the performance of a website. While a number of prior studies have investigated the functionality of hotel websites, the usability issue has largely been overlooked in the existing hospitality literature. What is more, there is virtually an entire absence of published articles which compare and contrast website usability between chain and independent hotels. This paper presents a study that applied the modified heuristic evaluation technique to compute Usability Hazards Indices of hotel websites in Hong Kong. Experimental results showed that the hazard indices of chain hotels were significantly lower than the hazards indices of independent hotels. In other words, usability performance of chain hotels was significantly better than that of independent hotels. The possible explanations to this finding are likely due to the difference in financial support and the difference in operating scales between chain and independent hotels. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Website; Usability; Chain hotels; Independent hotels; Hong Kong
1. Introduction Recently the hotel industry has been experiencing a rapid growth of chain properties. Go and Pine (1995) stated that the benefits which chain operations can offer include nationwide advertising and an (inter)national reservations and referral network. Go and Pine (1995) further argued that the trend towards hotel chain affiliation will continue in the future. Similarly, Kotler et al. (1999) stated that the *Corresponding author. Tel.: +852-2766-6349; fax: +852-2362-9362. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (T.Au. Yeung), [email protected] (R. Law). 0278-4319/$ - see front matter r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.ijhm.2003.03.001
ARTICLE IN PRESS 308
T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
present hotel industry is dominated by chains, and these chains are operated in a highly competitive environment where aggressive marketing skills are needed. One of the ways which chain hotels excel independent hotels is through their marketing channel, including the newly emerged online channel on the Internet. Ever since the introduction of the Internet and its associated business applications, hotel managers have been fascinated with the huge potential benefits that the technology can bring to their business. Hence, most chain and independent hotels have established their own websites. Setting up a website is presently affordable as the related costs are not enormously high. Once established, the website allows a hotel to conduct a larger scale of business with a potential worldwide audience. It enables everyone with an Internet connection to access its information, irrespective of geographical location, time zone, or computer system. In other words, the website enables hotel products more accessible to the new marketplace. In spite of the increasing Internet applications to hotels and the growing popularity of hotel chains, published articles in the existing hospitality literature rarely investigated the relationship of chain and independent hotel websites. The absence of prior studies on chain versus independent hotel websites is particularly true in the context of website usability. In other words, chain and independent hotel managers cannot know whether their websites meet the best practice from a design perspective, and therefore, do not have useful information to facilitate continuous improvements. This paper makes an attempt to bridge such a gap in the hospitality literature by incorporating the modified heuristic usability evaluation technique, which was proposed by Au Yeung and Law (2003), into chain and independent hotel websites in Hong Kong, a leading tourist destination in Asia. The usability performance, quantified in numeric Usability Hazards Indices, should benefit hotel managers from better understanding how appealing their websites are, the websites’ inter-category and intra-category performance, and to judge a hotel website’s performance versus its peers.
2. Related work on website usability and functionality Everyone agrees with the importance of Internet applications in the hotel industry. However, the real challenge of Internet commerce in the hotel industry lies in using the technology in a way which ultimately makes business sense (Gilbert et al., 1999). Specifically, hotel managers have to ensure that their websites provide the right content and are usable to users. Many prior studies have been performed to investigate website design and user preference. For instance, Kim and Moon (1998) performed a study which examined how manipulation of different interface design factors could induce customer confidence. Another study performed by Rhodes (1998) suggested that good content, simple design, and few grammatical errors were required to establish website trust, and users tended to trust websites that are more usable. Lu and Yeung (1998) proposed a framework for effective commercial Web applications, and a major component of the effectiveness relates to the usefulness of a website, which further divides into functionality and usability levels. According to
ARTICLE IN PRESS T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
309
Lu and Yeung (1998), usefulness refers to whether a website is helpful to users to accomplish its intended purposes. In the hotel industry, functionality relates to the degree of information provision about the website’s services/products (Chung and Law, 2003; Liang and Law, 2003), whereas usability examines to what extent a website is efficient and enjoyable to use for its products/services being promoted (Au Yeung and Law, 2003). Performing well in functionality does not directly imply that the hotel website is useful to users as usefulness also depends on usability. The ultimate goal of usability is to make a hotel website more efficient and enjoyable for users to experience. Nielsen (2000) proposed that usability should contain five factors, namely easy to learn, efficient to use, easy to remember, few errors and pleasant to use. A few methods to evaluate website usability have been proposed but the most popular method appears to be the heuristic evaluation which was originated from Nielsen (1993). A heuristic evaluation involves the examination of a user interface by a small group of assessors who look for violations of common usability criteria (heuristic). The usability hazards to be identified in a heuristic evaluation can then be tackled immediately, leading to a redesign, or be used for further usability testing. The approach basically involves identifying the usability attributes, gathering opinions about the usability of particular websites, merging and rating the problems that were identified, and finally trying to work towards solutions. During the opinions gathering stage, evaluators are required to score the severity level of each attribute, using a nominal judgmental scale. A value at the low end of the scale usually means that the evaluators do not find a problem. A score at the high end, however, indicates that the concerned attribute shows a catastrophic problem.
3. Methodology 3.1. Questionnaire design and data collection The selected dimensions and their associated attributes mainly followed the questionnaire developed by Au Yeung and Law (2003) for initially testing usability performance among luxury, mid-priced, and economy hotel websites, which was originated from Abeleto (2002). The usability performance of a hotel website, measured by an overall website Usability Hazards Index, is function of the individual performance of five dimensions, and can be computed by a modified heuristic usability evaluation technique. Each dimension comprised multiple attributes, and each attribute stated a specific website usability hazard. Fig. 1 shows the sketch of this usability performance framework. The questionnaire was then completed by a group hotel website users including hotel guests, hotel managers, and IT professionals (thirty in each group). These users actually ranked the importance of all attributes in a dimension. In total, there were 24 attributes in the five dimensions. Specifically, all attributes were ranked from the most offensive practice to the least offensive practice. Respondents were also
ARTICLE IN PRESS 310
T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
Dimension 1: Language Usability
Dimension 2: Layout and Graphics Usability Dimension 3: Information Architecture Usability
Website Usability Performance (Overall Usability Hazards Index)
Dimension 4: User Interface and Navigation Usability Dimension 5: General Usability Fig. 1. A usability performance framework of hotel websites.
requested to weigh the relative importance of responses from each users group so that an Importance Index for each usability attribute within its associated dimension could then be computed. A checklist in a five-point judgemental scale was then developed based on the questionnaire, which was then used by two evaluators to assess the severity of each usability hazard on a specific hotel website. The use of two evaluators to assess each website was to eliminate the possibility of personal bias. In this study, the websites of 77 hotels of the Hong Kong Hotels Association were chosen for analysis. 3.2. Computation of importance index Let c; h; and t be the number of hotel guests, hotel managers, and IT professionals. In addition, let C% r ; H% r ; and T% r be the mean score for the rth attribute ranked by hotel customers, hotel managers, and IT professionals for r ¼ 1; 2; y; n in the n number of attributes within a dimension. Lastly, let Pi ; Qi ; and Ri be the relative importance of responses provided by respondent i in the group of hotel customers, hotel managers, and IT professionals subject to Pi þ Qi þ Ri ¼ 100%: An Importance Index, Ir; of attribute r for r ¼ 1; 2; y:; n can be derived for each usability attribute within its dimension using the following mathematical function: Pm Pm Pm Qi Ri H% r T% r C% r i¼1 Pi i¼1 i¼1 I r ¼ Pn þ Pn þ Pn ; ð1Þ % % % m m m r¼1 Hr r¼1 Tr r¼1 Cr where m is the sum of c; h; and t: The Importance Index of an attribute thus represents its relative importance within a specific dimension, and the sum of the Importance Indices within a
ARTICLE IN PRESS T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
311
dimension equals 1. A checklist for the heuristic evaluation was established based on these Importance Indices. 3.3. Computation of usability hazards index For each hotel website and for each website attribute, a mean rating score was calculated based on the result of group evaluation. The mean rating score for hotel t was then transformed to a Usability Hazards Index, Ht ; t ¼ 1; 2; y; m for m hotel websites, using the following approach: Ur ¼ ðS% r 1ÞIr 5; ð2Þ Di ¼
n X
Ur ;
ð3Þ
Di ;
ð4Þ
r¼1
Ht ¼
5 X i¼1
where n is the number of attributes within a dimension i; i ¼ 1; 2; y; 5; Sr the evaluators’ mean rating score for the rth attribute; r ¼ 1; 2; y; n; Ir the Importance Index of attribute r; r ¼ 1; 2; y; n; Ur the Usability Hazards Index of attribute r; r ¼ 1; 2; y; n; Di the Usability Hazards Index of dimension i; i ¼ 1; 2; y; 5: It should be noted that the value of Usability Hazard Index of each dimension could range from the minimum 0, representing ‘‘no problem found on this dimension’’ to the maximum 20, representing ‘‘destructive problems found on this dimension’’. Adding up the scores in the five dimensions produced the overall Usability Hazards Index of a hotel website in the range of 0 to 100. This overall index then fell into one of the four levels in a conversion table, which was developed on the basis of an equal percentile approach (Liang and Law, 2003). The levels included ‘‘minor problems’’, ‘‘medium problems’’, ‘‘major problems’’, and ‘‘destructive problems’’ found on a website. In this research, the usability performance of a hotel website is measured by the overall Usability Hazards Index of the website.
4. Findings and discussion All websites of the Hong Kong Hotels Association were chosen for examination in this study, which included 50 chain hotels and 27 independent hotels. Table 1 shows the usability performance, measured in Usability Hazards Indices, of chain hotels, independent hotels, and all hotels. The average Usability Hazards Indices of the chain hotels and independent hotels were 17.365 and 23.65 respectively, indicating minor problems were found on the websites. Among the five dimensions, chain hotels performed significantly better than independent hotels in the dimensions of language usability and information architecture usability. In addition, the overall Usability Hazards Indices of chain hotels scored significantly lowered than
ARTICLE IN PRESS 312
T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
Table 1 Comparison of website Usability Hazards Indices between chain hotels and independent hotels
Dimension 1 total Dimension 2 total Dimension 3 total Dimension 4 total Dimension 5 total Overall Usability Hazards Index
Chain hotels (n ¼ 50)
Independent hotels (n ¼ 27)
All hotels (n ¼ 77)
t
Sig.
1.754 3.996 2.182 4.587 4.847 17.365
3.134 4.928 4.595 5.958 5.036 23.650
2.238 4.323 3.028 5.068 4.913 19.569
2.373 1.280 3.448 1.701 0.182 2.404
0.020 0.204 0.001 0.093 0.856 0.019
Significant at a ¼ 0:05:
independent hotels. This showed that chain hotels performed significantly better than independent hotels in terms of website usability. The significant difference in usability performance can be explained by the difference in financial and technical support between chain and independent hotels. Siguaw et al. (2000) stated that due to the larger amount of financial and human resources from which they can draw, chain hotels are better at disseminating technological information, training employees, and installing computer systems to improve performance. Powers and Barrows (1999) claimed that chains have strengths in six different areas, including marketing and brand recognition, site selection expertise, access to capital, purchasing economies, centrally administered control and information systems, and personnel program development. These all represent economies of scale: the spreading of a centralized activity over a large number of units so that each unit absorbs only a small portion of the cost but all have the benefit of specialized expertise or buying power. Hence, chain hotel websites are able to perform better than independent hotel websites. O’Connor (1999) echoed such a claim, and stated that most chain hotels have a central website which contains a search engine that makes it easy for potential customers to find the products that meet their needs. In contrast, many independent hotel websites tend to contain only static web pages, on which users have to browse through before they can find their needed information.
5. Conclusions and future research This study has extended the modified heuristic usability evaluation technique to compare and contrast the usability performance between chain and independent hotel websites. Experimental results indicate that, due to the strong support and wide operation scale, chain hotels received overall Usability Hazards Indices which were significantly lowered than independent hotels. In other words, the website usability performance of chain hotels was significantly better than their independent counterparts. The industrial implications for chain hotels are, therefore, to spend more effort to improve the attributes that are important but do not significantly
ARTICLE IN PRESS T.Au Yeung, R. Law / Hospitality Management 23 (2004) 307–313
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outperform independent hotels. For independent hotels, managers should pay attention to the important attributes that are significantly behind chain hotels. After all, usability is largely the experience of users. While the findings of this study appear reasonable, the sample size is far from making any generalizable conclusions. A future study is, therefore, to increase the sample size to investigate hotel website users on their perception of website usability attributes. It would be valuable to develop a generic computation model to quantitatively evaluate the usability of hotel websites.
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