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Top1. Introduction
The global network development has led to the application of web-technologies nearly in all areas, including commerce (Kim & McFadden, 2019). At present, there are many competing commercial webpages, with the majority of marketing being done by them (Zhang et al., 2019). In various applied areas, there are some peculiarities in webpages design and their perception (Meira et al., 2014). For example, in the field of dangerous goods transportation, making a quick decision is a matter of great importance (Tatarinov & Kirsanov, 2019). In e-commerce, the users’ running into difficulties and high cognitive load when using a webpage result in leaving the webpage and looking for a more convenient alternative in the net. The webpage usability influences user’s decision directly what web-portal to use (Huang, 2018), (Varela et al., 2017). Therefore, the evaluation of usability has become important to make a decision what design to employ for a certain commercial webpage.
To improve commercial web-portal usability, it should be redesigned. Redesigning of the whole portal or some of its webpages does not always lead to a positive result despite the designers’ expectations (Muslim et al., 2019). Nowadays the opinion on how to carry out the redesign of certain web-portals varies (Miller, 2019). A web-portal being in service and in a wide use, a sudden change in its design may result in the drop in the number of clients. Meanwhile an outdated design of webpages may however force web-portal conversion down. To minimize the risks of such a sharp drop, the redesigning should be made step-by-step evaluating the webpage usability shift at each step employing one of the evaluation methods. The importance of usability has developed a number of formal methods to be used for a webpage evaluation. The majority of these methods are qualitative. They are aimed at finding out the problems of usability (Kushniruk et al., 2015), while some of them allow quantitative evaluation (Diaz et al., 2019).
Quantitative evaluation, however, may be useful to compare the webpage usability before and after redesign, and to compare your own webpage with the one of a competitor. To obtain quantitative evaluation of a webpage usability, some certain metrics should be aggregated. While aggregating the data, most methods do not allow for possible interdependency between certain metrics (Diaz et al., 2019). Some methods allow for such dependences by applying non-additive integrals (Cebi, 2013). The relevant metrics allow for usability aspects of a web-portal in the whole rather than of certain webpages.
The methods of quantitative evaluation may be divided into two groups. The first group is based on a survey for webpage users (Diaz et al., 2019). The questionnaires are suggested to obtain subjective data from users to find out their satisfaction by Likert scale. The second group is based on the application of usage-based metrics (Harrati et al., 2016). Such metrics can be obtained while watching users actions, e.g. measuring the time a user needs to fulfill a task with the use of a webpage (Paz et al., 2019) or measuring user’s brain activity (Yamanaka, 2018). As for the first group, it disturbs the users since they would not like to waste their time for the survey. The second group methods are locked down by the user’s behavior parameters which can be received remotely such as a mouse click chart, time spent with the webpage, etc. Such features do not show user cognitive load as well as his emotional state. One of the methods from the second group is A/B test. Unfortunately, it may take long time to receive results from the test while making step-by-step redesigning of a webpage because users do not show due activity on all websites. Moreover, the search engines may determine A/B test as threats (Abuwardih, 2018). Therefore, the creation of such an approach that could be free from the above mentioned limitations is considered to be urgent.