The Criteria of Usability Design for Educational Online Courses

Kateryna V. Vlasenko

1,2 a

, Sergii V. Volkov

3 b

, Iryna V. Lovianova

4 c

, Irina V. Sitak

3 d

Olena O. Chumak

5 e

, Serhiy O. Semerikov

4,6,7,8 f

and Nataliia H. Bohdanova

9 g

Department of Mathematics, National University of “Kyiv Mohyla Academy”, 2 Hryhoriya Skovorody Str., Kyiv, 04655,

Ukraine

Technical University “Metinvest Polytechnic” LLC, 71A Sechenov Str., Mariupol, 87524, Ukraine

Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University, 59A Tsentralnyi Ave., Severodonetsk, 93400, Ukraine

Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University, 54 Gagarin Ave., Kryvyi Rih, 50086, Ukraine

Donbas National Academy of Civil Engineering and Architecture, 14 Lazo Str., Kramatorsk, 84333, Ukraine

Kryvyi Rih National University, 11 Vitalii Matusevych Str., Kryvyi Rih, 50027, Ukraine

Institute of Information Technologies and Learning Tools of the NAES of Ukraine, 9 M. Berlynskoho Str., Kyiv, 04060,

Ukraine

University of Educational Management, 52A Sichovykh Striltsiv Str., Kyiv, 04053, Ukraine

Ukrainian Engineering Pedagogics Academy, 16 Universytetska Str., Kharkiv, 61003, Ukraine

bogdanovang@ukr.net

Keywords:

Criteria of Usability Design, Online Education, Online Course, Implementing the Usability Principles.

Abstract:

The article addresses the issue of implementing the usability principles of educational internet resources.

The paper debates the latest researches on the question concerning the search for the factors that inﬂuence

the results of online education. The analysis, which we carried out, allowed us to focus on such known six

criteria of usability design as Information Quality, System Navigation, System Learnability, Visual Design,

Instructional Assessment, and System Interactivity and suggest the existence of the seventh criterion named

Responsiveness. The research considers the principles of usability implementation following the example of

the open platform of online education “Higher School Mathematics Teacher”. The answers given by 203

respondents during the survey allowed deﬁning the direction of implementing the usability criteria on the

platform. We were eager to know the opinion of teachers and students who became the ﬁrst users of the

platform. The article discusses the criteria implementation while developing online courses on the platform.

There was ground to conclude that when designing online platform courses, all seven usability subcategories

are important.

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Problem Statement

Developing online courses is one way to a sustainable

future for our society through education (Vlasenko

et al., 2021, 2022). The modern market for online ed-

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8920-5680

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7938-3080

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3186-2837

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2593-1293

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3722-6826

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0789-0272

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7956-5818

ucation offers a great number of online courses for ed-

ucating adults, young people, and children. The sub-

ject matter and complexity of such courses differ a lot,

but certain development principles and operation of

educational internet resources have a lot in common.

One of the most important questions while develop-

ing any of the sites is its usability. This term is used

as a measure of site friendliness, its understandabil-

ity, and naturalness for the user. Web-site usability is

determined by simplicity. Simplicity makes internet

resources easy to perceive by users, makes it possi-

ble to carry out a fast shift to the necessary content,

and facilitates access to information. Therefore, the

research of usability issues in educational software is

an important aspect of developing distance education.

Vlasenko, K., Volkov, S., Lovianova, I., Sitak, I., Chumak, O., Semerikov, S. and Bohdanova, N.

The Criteria of Usability Design for Educational Online Courses.

DOI: 10.5220/0010925200003364

In Proceedings of the 1st Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology (AET 2020) - Volume 1, pages 461-470

ISBN: 978-989-758-558-6

461

1.2 Literature Review

While searching for the factors that inﬂuence the

results of online education, scientists paid attention

to the interface of educational platforms. Nielsen

(Nielsen, 1993) was one of the ﬁrst scientists who

used the term usability. He developed a heuristic eval-

uation – a methodology for researching software us-

ability. The so-called “Nielsen protocol” consists of

ten heuristics developed for the software:

(1) The user can detect the system status;

(2) The system uses the terminology, which is con-

venient for the user;

(3) Free system manageability, support of removal

function (undo) and repetition function (redo);

(4) Consistency and standards;

(5) Error prevention and warning the user about fur-

ther problems;

(6) Load minimization on the user’s memory;

(7) Flexibility and efﬁciency of the usage;

(8) Aesthetic and minimal design;

(9) The system has to offer the user a constructive

solution to the issues that arise;

(10) Presence of reference information in the system.

Benson et al. (Benson et al., 2002) increased

the number of heuristics up to ﬁfteen when they de-

veloped them speciﬁcally for electronic education.

While designing the systems of electronic education,

Srivastava et al. (Srivastava et al., 2009) proved that

the attention should be focused on the learning out-

comes and not only on satisfying users’ interests. The

interface has to be attractive and simple to use, but

its main task is to enable the user to build their strat-

egy of education. Squires and Preece (Squires and

Preece, 1999) offered an approach that integrates the

idea of software usability heuristics with the idea of

considering the educational results and issues. In sci-

entists’ opinion, the main criterion of developing elec-

tronic education has to become its reliability. Asar-

bakhsh and Sandars (Asarbakhsh and Sandars, 2013)

named the usefulness of technologies and their usabil-

ity among the signiﬁcant factors that should be con-

sidered while developing and implementing technolo-

gies of online education.

While highlighting and describing six criteria of

usability design, Alshehri et al. (Alshehri et al., 2019)

formulated and researched these criteria concerning

their importance for students:

• Information Quality (IQ);

• System Navigation (SN);

• System Learnability (SL);

• Visual Design (VD);

• Instructional Assessment (IA)

• System Interactivity (SI).

While ascertaining if this list of criteria could be

considered full taking into account the possibility to

use mobile devices by users, we addressed the statis-

tics data (Enge, 2021). It is clear from the data that

58% of site visits were from mobile devices. 44%

of mobile device users visited the sites of the cat-

egory “Career and Education” and 42% visited the

sites of the category “Science”. Using the service

Google Analytics (Google, 2021) we detected that

35% of users of the platform “Higher School Mathe-

matics Teacher” (formathematics.com, 2019) also use

mobile devices. So, while analyzing the statistics we

can say that the pattern of growth of website visitors

from mobile devices will be kept in the future. Tak-

ing this fact into account we considered it necessary

to introduce an additional seventh criterion “usability

design” for educational web systems called Respon-

siveness (RS) that would reﬂect usability for visitors

from mobile devices. The relevance of this assump-

tion was checked in the research results.

This article is aimed at analyzing the online course

developers’ approaches to implement usability, show-

ing usability implementation principles following the

example of the open platform of online education

“Higher School Mathematics Teacher”

2 METHODS

During the research, the analysis of the resources was

used (Nielsen, 1993; Benson et al., 2002; Srivastava

et al., 2009; Squires and Preece, 1999; Asarbakhsh

and Sandars, 2013; Alshehri et al., 2019; Enge, 2021;

Vlasenko et al., 2020c; Antonelli et al., 2015; Aery,

2007; S

anchez-Franco et al., 2013; Kurtcu, 2012; Lin

et al., 2013; Mansor, 2012; Shahzada, 2017). As a

result of the analysis, seven usability criteria of edu-

cational platform were determined.

2.1 The Criterion of Information

Quality

The criterion of Information Quality reﬂects the ac-

curacy, correspondence, completeness and actuality,

simplicity of its understanding. The indicator of this

criterion mainly depends on the competence of the tu-

tor who creates and supports the online course.

The educational platform should consist of nec-

essary tools so that the tutor can post content of the

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

462

online course to ensure the information quality. The

tutor has to be able to add and edit conveniently text,

graphic, animation, video, and audio content, publish

documents of standard formats (presentations, mathe-

matical expressions, PDF documents, etc.). The anal-

ysis and description of tools for posting an online

course are represented in the article (Vlasenko et al.,

2020c).

2.2 The Criterion of System Navigation

It is necessary to organize navigation elements, the

quality of which reﬂects the criterion of System Nav-

igation, for fast and convenient navigation through the

sections of the educational platform. It implies sim-

plicity and navigation options, link reliability, under-

standability of action sequence, and easy accessibil-

ity.

Interactive elements such as buttons or hypertext

links are used for the technical implementation of the

navigation system. For convenience, these elements

have a separate interface that is different in its color

range from the main content and interface. Usually,

the navigation elements have interactive characteris-

tics that change while using them in a particular way.

For instance, when the cursor moves over the element

or clicking the mouse button on the element, its style

changes and it makes it clear for the user that this is a

navigation element. For making the element clearer,

it is necessary to add a tooltip that reﬂects the name

or an abstract of the section that it refers to.

Navigation elements can be united in groups fol-

lowing their structural characteristics. These groups

create the main and additional menu, a structural map,

or a sitemap. The main menu is usually displayed at

the top and the bottom of the interface in order to at-

tract the user’s attention to it as it contains a link to

the main sections of the educational system (Antonelli

et al., 2015). The structural map of the educational

platform includes a complete hierarchy of references

to the sections, subsections, and content that enables

the user to navigate to any page of the hierarchy.

Navigation chains (so-called “breadcrumbs”) that

allow us to visually represent the hierarchy of top-

level pages and navigate on them are displayed on ev-

ery page for ease of navigation. (Aery, 2007). This el-

ement is particularly important when there are a great

number of pages that are put one in another.

The reliability of links reﬂects the absence of nav-

igation elements that refer to the non-existing content

or section. This situation takes place when the oper-

ator gives the wrong reference system or content is

deleted from the system without updating the naviga-

tion structure. For preventing the reliability decrease

planned veriﬁcations of navigation structure with the

help of special software (Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Tool, Netpeak Spider, SiteAnalyzer, etc.) or manual

testing is used.

The ease of navigation increases while imple-

menting on the educational platform a search system

that helps the user to navigate fast to the necessary

content following the formed request. The search ele-

ments can be displayed at the top of the interface and

additionally in a sidebar or at the bottom.

2.3 The Criterion of System

Learnability

The criterion of System Learnability characterizes

learning simplicity and promptness. Similar to the

criterion of information quality, it depends on the on-

line course developer’s competence. The criterion in-

cludes learning simplicity, predictability of links, and

learning without any initial preparation, formulation

accuracy, and sufﬁcient online assistance.

In order to ensure System Learnability, the tutor

has to determine clear aims and objectives of learning

an online course, create a learning program accord-

ing to the aims and objectives, develop the structure,

content, forms, and methods of knowledge control,

determine criteria of knowledge assessment, describe

requirements for task completion, and ensure control

over the learning process, keep in touch with course

participants in form of private or group online consul-

tations.

2.4 The Criterion of Visual Design

Apart from the quality of text, graphic, and multi-

media information, the educational platform needs to

have aesthetic attractiveness and convenient location

of system interface elements (S

anchez-Franco et al.,

2013) that enables users to perceive adequately the

provided information. The criterion of Visual Design

is an integral part of evaluating the interface of any in-

formation system. It includes readability, design aes-

thetics, quality of template structure, and typography,

and the sequence of posting information on the edu-

cational platform.

In order to ensure design aesthetics general prin-

ciples of interface creation are used. A general tem-

plate of displaying information blocks is chosen and it

usually has a header, footer, sidebar, and block of the

main content. A logo or name of the educational plat-

form is displayed at the top of the interface. Typogra-

phy that determines text view is chosen. A font with

notches or without, a particular style display for head-

ings, subheadings, and main text can be used (Kurtcu,

The Criteria of Usability Design for Educational Online Courses

463

2012). The main color range in RGB model coding

is determined. Usually, light colors are used for the

background, dark colors for the main content, and ad-

ditional colors for structural elements and links. For

the sense of use simplicity and clarity, the ratio be-

tween qualitative use of graphics and text is recom-

mended to be used proportionally from 3:1 to 1:1 (Lin

et al., 2013).

2.5 The Criterion of Instructional

Assessment

The criterion of Instructional Assessment reﬂects the

efﬁciency of assessment tools, simplicity of their use,

feasibility of achieving educational aims, accessibil-

ity for material understanding, and informative nature

of feedback.

For the implementation of this criterion on the

educational platform tools for assessment and self-

assessment are implemented and integrated: testing,

survey, task sending, feedback forms, assessment

book. Cloud services such as Google Forms, For-

mDesigner, Typeform, MyQuiz, etc. can be used for

most of the indicated assessment methods (Mansor,

2012). The alternative to cloud services can be an in-

dividual development of assessment subsystem using

a corresponding programming language and frame-

work frontend (React.js, Angular, jQuery, Node.js,

and others). In this case, data is stored on the server

in the database, and access to them is ensured us-

ing the authorization mechanism and distribution of

users’ roles.

2.6 The Criterion of System

Interactivity

The criterion of System Interactivity reﬂects the qual-

ity of interaction between participants of the educa-

tional process. This criterion includes the efﬁciency

of communication tools, implementation of interac-

tion tutor-student, student-student. Interaction tutor-

student can be implemented using modern Internet

services that are integrated into the educational plat-

form.

For text communication emails, web-forums,

messengers (Telegram, Viber, WhatsApp, etc.), and

social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,

etc.) are used. It often occurs that not only one

but several services are used together. Emailing or

push-messages are used to send organizational mes-

sages. Visual communication is implemented using

the system of video-conferences (Zoom, Microsoft

Teams, Google Meet, etc.). The ﬁle exchange can

be done using cloud storages (Dropbox, OneDrive,

Google Drive, iCloud, etc.), emails, and messengers.

However, email services have limits for the size of

ﬁles that are sent and ﬁltering according to the ﬁle

types (for instance, archives, executable ﬁles). That’s

why email is not convenient for this purpose. Mes-

sengers also have a considerable disadvantage that is

explained by the fact that sent ﬁles are stored on the

participants’ devices but not on the server. This factor

indicates the unreliability of this method because, in

case of changing or damaging a device or accidental

removal, ﬁles can be lost forever. Nowadays, cloud

storages are the most reliable and convenient method

for ﬁle exchange. The criterion of System Interactiv-

ity will depend on choosing the best combination of

the described communicative services and their tech-

nical integration in the educational platform.

2.7 The Criterion of Responsiveness

The criterion of Responsiveness reﬂects the quality of

aesthetic interface display of the educational platform

on mobile devices that have different resolutions. As

the number of users of mobile devices is constantly

growing, this criterion is important nowadays. The

criterion includes the responsiveness of the layout,

image, media, menu, and navigation elements.

In order to ensure the responsiveness of the plat-

form design, methods to represent the interface using

stylization CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for particu-

lar device capabilities are used. In this case, the in-

terface has several visualizations that are created par-

ticularly for devices following their screen resolution.

Sometimes several options of the interface posted on

separate Internet subdomains are used to support de-

sign responsiveness. But this variant is not an optimal

solution, since it is necessary to make changes in all

interface variants if the platform functionality is en-

larged or changed.

Using stylization CSS the template of posting

information blocks is changed but the interface el-

ements have a different view on mobile devices,

tablets, and computers. The size of the text, headings

and subheadings, links, buttons, image size, and other

interface elements are adapted following this crite-

rion. Modern programming frameworks (Bootstrap,

Angular, React, Node.js, etc.) can be used to imple-

ment Responsiveness (Shahzada, 2017).

3 RESULTS

The above-mentioned parameters were included in

the survey of higher school teachers and students. The

survey was aimed at getting the respondents’ assess-

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

464

ment concerning the usability and simplicity of online

courses on educational platforms that are used by the

respondents. The survey was divided into two parts.

In the ﬁrst part, there were questions concerning the

information about the respondents, such as sex, age,

status (teacher, student), their experience of using on-

line courses and educational platforms on which they

took online courses, and the aim of online educa-

tion. This information was gathered to get descriptive

statistics of research selection and selection of educa-

tional online platforms for the analysis. The second

part of the survey included the questions concerning

the relative importance (value) of the determined us-

ability categories and subcategories and category rat-

ings for users.

This section included 35 elements divided into

seven parts. We had to determine the category place

from 1 to 7 depending on its impact on the platform

usability (where 1 is the most important). Getting a

smaller evaluation rate of the corresponding feature

of usability demonstrates its greater importance for

teachers and students during the online course. Sub-

categories have to be evaluated using a 3-point scale

where “–1” affects the criterion, “0” does not affect

the criterion at all, “+1” has a positive effect on the

criterion.

The survey was held directly by the tutors of the

educational online platform “Higher School Mathe-

matics Teacher” in higher schools. 246 participants

took part in the survey, among them 85 teachers and

161 students of Donbas State Engineering Academy,

Volodymyr Dahl East Ukrainian National University,

Kryvyi Rih State Pedagogical University, Donbas Na-

tional Academy of Civil Engineering and Architec-

ture. It must be said that 43 participants (18 teachers

and 25 students who constituted 17.4% of the respon-

dents) stated that they had never used online educa-

tion. Therefore, the ﬁnal number of respondents is

203 participants – 67 teachers and 136 students.

We offer to consider the division of respondents

according to their age and sex in table 1.

According to the survey results in table 2, the

majority of respondents (70.9%) studied the on-

line courses in higher schools developed using the

distance learning system Moodle (Polhun et al.,

2021). Furthermore, the respondents used the plat-

forms Prometheus (Prometheus, 2019), EdEra (Ed-

Era, 2019), The Open University (The Open Uni-

versity, 2019), Edx (EdX, 2019), Coursera (Cours-

era, 2019), Intuit (Intuit, 2019) for education (respon-

dents had a possibility to name several educational re-

sources).The aim of the education determined by the

majority (68.9%) was the current education; more-

over, skills development – 23.8%, acquiring addi-

tional skills – 3.1%, personal development – 4.2%.

We offer to consider the categories and subcate-

gories from the other survey part. We have found out

the importance of the deﬁned categories and subcate-

gories for users, their usability, and rating.

Category 1 – System Navigation (SN), subcate-

gories:

1.1 Ease of navigation

1.2 Navigation support

1.3 Reference reliability

1.4 Understandability of action sequence

1.5 Ease of access

Category 2 – Information Quality (IQ), subcate-

gories:

2.1 Ease of education

2.2 Reference predictability

2.3 Education without any initial prepa-

rations

2.4 Formulation clarity

2.5 Sufﬁcient online assistance

Category 3 – Visual Design (VD), subcategories:

3.1 Readability

3.2 Design aesthetics

3.3 Layout information content

3.4 Presentation structure

3.5 General course consistency

Category 4 – System Learnability (SL), subcate-

gories:

4.1 Information correctness

4.2 Information conformity

4.3 Information completeness

4.4 Ease of information understanding

4.5 Information timeliness

Category 5 – Instructional Assessment (IA), subcat-

egories:

5.1 Evaluation tools efﬁciency

5.2 Ease of using evaluation tools

5.3 Reality of achieving learning objec-

tives

5.4 Accessibility for material under-

standing

5.5 Feedback Information content

Category 6 – System Interactivity (SI), subcate-

gories:

6.1 Efﬁciency of communication tools

6.2 Implementation of communication

between the tutor and student

The Criteria of Usability Design for Educational Online Courses

465

Table 1: Division of respondents according to their age and sex.

Characteristics

Teacher Students Total

number % number % number %

sex

male respondents

female respondents

52.2

48.8

61.8

38.2

119

58.6

41.4

age

under 30

31-50

over 50

4.5

62.7

32.8

136

100

139

68.5

20.7

10.8

Table 2: Online platforms where respondents studied.

Characteristics

Teacher Students Total

number % number % number %

Moodle-based LMS 14 20.9 130 95.6 144 70.9

Prometheus 8 11.9 2 1.5 10 4.9

EdEra 16 23.9 - - 16 7.9

The Open University 4 6.0 1 0.7 5 2.5

Edx 4 6.0 2 1.5 6 3.0

Coursera 18 26.9 - - 18 8.9

Intuit 7 10.5 5 3.7 12 5.9

Other platforms 4 6.0 3 2.2 7 3.5

6.3 Possibility of communication

student-student

6.4 Interaction organization

6.5 Feedback speed

Category 7 – Responsiveness (RS), subcategories:

7.1 Flexible layouts (website layout that

will dynamically resize to any width)

7.2 Flexible images (scalable images)

7.3 Flexible media (scalable images,

video, and other formats)

7.4 Flexible menu

7.5 Flexible navigation

Respondents selectively evaluated each of the on-

line courses on 7 usability criteria. Each criterion was

evaluated on a scale from 1 to 7 (where 1 is the most

important, 7 is the least important). Based on these

results, the average values for the usability criteria for

each of the online courses were found. The results

of the respondents’ evaluation of usability criteria are

provided in table 3. In addition, the average estimates

of the signiﬁcance of the criteria for all online courses

that were selected are presented in ﬁgure 1.

The results analysis helped us to conﬁrm the as-

sumption about the necessity to consider one more

criterion. The respondents recognized the greater im-

portance of the criterion Responsiveness rather than

the criteria Instructional Assessment and System In-

teractivity.

Figure 1: The distribution of places categories from 1st to

7th depending on their impact on the usability of the plat-

form (where 1 is the most important).

We offer to consider the evaluation results of the

importance of usability subcategory in table 4.

According to the results, we can conclude that all

the usability subcategories are important because any

of them has a negative average rating.

4 DISCUSSION

While researching the usability of educational plat-

forms, scientists marked site usability as an important

element of developing educational platforms.

Inductive Content Analysis Method helped to de-

termine the direction of implementing usability cri-

teria on the platform “Higher School Mathematics

AET 2020 - Symposium on Advances in Educational Technology

466

Table 3: Respondents’ evaluation of online education systems according to Usability design criteria.

Systems of online education

Criteria

IQ SN SL VD IA SI RS

Systems of distant education based on Moodle 1.31 2.3 3.17 3.99 6.11 6.87 4.56

Prometheus 1.18 1.87 2.95 4.02 5.89 6.76 4.81

EdEra 1.04 2.12 3.01 3.68 6.03 6.94 5.12

The Open University 1.24 1.97 2.76 4.17 5.84 6.63 5.26

Edx 1.11 2.07 3.24 4.31 6.24 6.80 5.08

Coursera 2.13 3.14 1.05 3.79 5.26 6.48 4.74

Intuit 2.41 1.27 3.15 4.02 4.87 6.81 4.86

Teacher”. We agree with Alshehri et al. (Alshehri

et al., 2019) that the most important criterion of us-

ability design is Information Quality that describes

the correspondence of the information in the system

to learners’ needs. We have also considered point of

view of Nielsen and Loranger (Nielsen and Loranger,

2006), who point out that the efﬁciency of any ap-

plication work and its attractiveness for the user de-

pend on the search engine and navigation, download-

ing speed, menu design. In the authors’ opinion, the

focus on the user, their needs, and requests have to

be principal. This idea is agreed with the conclu-

sion provided by Hodakov and Boskin (Hodakov and

Boskin, 2017) in which they believe that the adaptive

user interface is the main criterion of computer system

attractiveness. Such interface reﬂects the capability

of a simple software product or a complicated pro-

gram technical complex to adapt to the user’s needs,

consider their psychophysical characteristics and abil-

ities, dynamic change, support the consolidation of

common actions to solve the given task.

The ranking results are presented in the diagram

(ﬁgure 1).

While analyzing categories and subcategories we

paid attention to the research by Dringus and Cohen

(Dringus and Cohen, 2005) who deﬁned 13 heuristic

categories that inﬂuence the usability of the educa-

tional environment on the Internet. They include vis-

ibility, functionality, aesthetics, feedback and assis-

tance, mistake prevention, memory, course manage-

ment, interactivity, ﬂexibility, consistency, efﬁciency,

mitigation, contraction, and accessibility. While re-

searching the criteria of evaluating the usability of

the electronic educational system, Fang and Holsap-

ple (Fang and Holsapple, 2007) highlighted system

navigation, performance system, visual design, infor-

mation quality, instructive assessment, and system in-

teractivity. Following the results of their research, in-

formation quality is the most important criterion; nav-

igation in the system of electronic education takes the

second place. Instructive assessment and system in-

teractivity are the least important design categories

that inﬂuence the usability evaluation of the elec-

tronic educational system. In order to consider the

concept of the platform “Higher School Mathemat-

ics Teacher” (formathematics.com, 2019), according

to which we have to take into account the wish of dif-

ferent age audience of online courses, we followed the

recommendations by Hasan (Hasan, 2014) who stud-

ied the usability of educational websites from univer-

sity students’ perspective. The scientist deﬁned that

the content and navigation are the ﬁrst and second de-

sirable design categories that have to be considered

during the usability evaluation of websites for educa-

tional programs while organization and architecture

are the least important categories.

Research conclusions reached by Vlasenko et al.

(Vlasenko et al., 2019, 2020a,b) and the analysis of

the results of teachers’ and students’ survey allowed

determining the direction of implementing usability

criteria on the platform “Higher School Mathematics

Teacher” (formathematics.com, 2019).

First of all, we found out how we can imple-

ment the criterion Information Quality (IQ) that de-

scribes the information correspondence in the system

to learners’ needs and the criterion System Learnabil-

ity (SL) that characterizes education simplicity and ra-

pidity. The quality of these criteria depends on the tu-

tor’s competence that creates and supports the online

course. In order to create high-quality content follow-

ing the criteria IQ and SL, the tutors of the platform

“Higher School Mathematics Teacher” (formathemat-

ics.com, 2019) are given a possibility to use software

tools to format the text, insert graphics, video- and

audio information, insert links, formulas, tests, sur-

veys. Vlasenko et al. (Vlasenko et al., 2020c) and

Panchenko et al. (Panchenko et al., 2020) described

the application use during the development of the ed-

ucational online platform.

The criterion System Navigation reﬂects the qual-

ity of navigational tools. On the platform, it is formed

with the help of main and additional menus that are

posted at the top of the interface and are present on

every page. Their presence allows the user to navi-

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467

Table 4: Respondents’ assessment of the usability subcategory importance.

Usability subcategories Average estimate

1.1. Ease of navigation

1.2 Navigation support

1.3 Reference reliability

1.4 Understandability of sequence of actions

1.5 Ease of getting access

0.91

0.72

0.64

0.78

0.81

2.1 Ease of education

2.2 Reference predictability

2.3 Education without any initial preparations

2.4 Formulation clarity

2.5 Sufﬁcient online assistance

0.88

0.42

0.56

0.71

0.65

3.1 Readability

3.2 Design aesthetics

3.3 Layout information content

3.4 Presentation structure

3.5 General course consistency

0.57

0.74

0.63

0.59

0.47

4.1 Information correctness

4.2 Information conformity

4.3 Information completeness

4.4 Ease of information understanding

4.5 Information timeliness

0.81

0.67

0.52

0.87

0.62

5.1 Evaluation tools efﬁciency

5.2 Ease of using evaluation tools

5.3 Reality of achieving learning objectives

5.4 Accessibility for material understanding

5.5 Feedback information content

0.42

0.37

0.93

0.86

0.72

6.1 Efﬁciency of communication tools

6.2 Implementation of communication between the tutor and student

6.3 Possibility of communication student - student

6.4 Interaction organization

6.5 Feedback speed

0.62

0.71

0.69

0.53

0.74

7.1 Layout ﬂexibility

7.2 Image scaling

7.3 Media scaling

7.4 Menu ﬂexibility

7.5 Navigation ﬂexibility

0.85

0.78

0.81

0.67

0.91

gate to the necessary section. In order to provide a

clear sequence, “breadcrumb” navigation is posted on

the pages and allows representing visually the hierar-

chy of top-level pages and navigating all over them.

The presence of such an element is especially impor-

tant when there are a great number of pages that are

put one in another. Ease of navigation is also provided

by the presence of links directly in the content of the

educational text.

The criterion Visual Design reﬂects the aesthet-

ics of displaying the educational system. In or-

der to ensure readability and aesthetic design the

following basic color scheme in the RGB model

coding was determined: light colors for the body

(#FFFFFF, #F0EAEE), dark color for the main con-

tent (#333333), and additional colors for structural

elements, for links (#993333, #B8999F, #D6DDE3).

The general structure of the platform interface in-

cludes a header, footer, sidebar, and content layout

elements. This structure corresponds to the purpose

of the platform information content. Typography was

chosen to provide the text and it includes the text

without any notches, a particular style display for

headings, subheadings, and the main text.

The criterion Instructional Assessment reﬂects the

simplicity and efﬁciency of evaluation tools. This cri-

terion is provided using feedback forms, subsystems

of testing, survey, and ﬁle downloading. Feedback

forms are used both for educational and general ques-

tions.

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468

The criterion System Interactivity reﬂects the pres-

ence of simple tools of interaction among participants

of the educational process. In order to correspond to

this criterion the forum of the platform users that en-

sures the interaction student-teacher, teacher-student,

and student-student was implemented.

The criterion Responsiveness reﬂects the quality,

aesthetics of system display on mobile devices that

have different resolutions. In order to ensure the

adaptability of platform design, methods of the inter-

face presentation using stylization CSS for particular

separate capabilities of the devices are used. The el-

ements of the menu and sidebar interface have a par-

ticular view on mobile devices. Text size, headings

and subheadings, links, buttons, image size, and other

interface elements were adapted to correspond to this

criterion.

Localization and customization are also important

in order to implement usability. The adaptation of

mass products on demand of a particular customer

on the educational platform “Higher School Math-

ematics Teacher” takes place through partial con-

tent change following a particular request, additional

stafﬁng of the course with extra activities and mate-

rials. Platform tutors monitor regularly discussions

concerning the courses on the “Teachers’ forum”, re-

act promptly to offers made by the users of the course.

The development of new courses is also based on

studying requests and wishes made by platform users.

5 CONCLUSIONS

The actuality of researching the usability issue in edu-

cational software as a direction of developing distance

education arises from the growth of the modern Inter-

net education market. This implies particular require-

ments concerning the usability of online courses.

The Inductive Content Analysis Method helped us

review the existing researches concerning the criterial

basis of usability design. This method also helped to

deﬁne the actual usability criteria of the educational

platform as well as to provide an assumption about

the necessity to consider the criterion driven by the

presence and active use of mobile devices.

In order to clarify the hypothesis, we developed

a survey for teachers and students who are online

course users. The analysis of survey results was held

in two directions: to get descriptive statistics of on-

line course users and study the relative importance of

evaluating categories of educational platform usabil-

ity. Such an approach to the survey allowed getting

substantial information concerning the preferences of

online course users that should be taken into consid-

eration during its development.

Therefore, according to the research results, we

found out that it is worthwhile to add the criterion

Responsiveness that reﬂects the usability of mobile

devices for online education. So, according to the re-

sults of researches and surveys, we offer the next or-

der of usability criteria in descending order:

1. Information Quality (IQ);

2. System Navigation (SN);

3. System Learnability (SL);

4. Visual Design (VD);

5. Responsiveness (RS);

6. Instructional Assessment (IA)

7. System Interactivity (SI).

Further research will be aimed at the usability

criteria analysis of the educational online platform

“Higher School Mathematics Teacher”.

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