Despite the widespread availability of e-learning websites in the Arab world, the link between Arabic culture, Arabic language and the usability of e-learning websites has been researched very little. Moreover, the Arab world lacks usability guidelines to support the creation of effective Arabic e-learning websites. Poor usability often means poor user interaction and hence reduced user acceptance and satisfaction. This research undertakes an experiment with 50 Arab participants to investigate their judgement of an Arabic and English e-learning website. The participants completed seven e-learning tasks and completed an e-learning, evaluation, usability, and aesthetics questionnaire. The participants gave their feedback on the positive and negative features of each e-learning website following the experiment. This experiment was followed by a case study and fuzzy set theory analysis to validate the results. The findings are summarised in nine Arabic usability guidelines. This thesis contributes to the body of knowledge in various ways. Firstly, it establishes the differences between Arabic and English languages and their effects on usability. Secondly, it identifies the design elements and barriers that affect the usability of Arabic websites. Thirdly, it produces nine usability guidelines for improving the usability of Arabic e-learning websites. In particular, these guidelines suggest using appropriate images and contents, which respect cultural and religious values, by using blue as a main colour, 12/13-point font size and Arabic Traditional font type, and that the written content should be written by an native Arabic-speaking writer. These guidelines contribute towards creating e-learning systems that have high learnability and high efficiency. However, aesthetics may not have a strong influence on the judgement of Arab users.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:619434 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Benaida, M. |
| Publisher | University of Salford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://usir.salford.ac.uk/31988/ |
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