Role of Usability in E-Learning System: An Empirical Study of OWASP WebGoat

Introduction

Amongst the principal attributes of quality, usability is the one that appraises user interfaces (Nielsen, 2012). Usability has five major quality components (learnability, efficiency, memorability, error and satisfaction) which play a vital role in assessing the user friendliness of any product (Nielsen, 2012). It is a matter of enhancing as well as maintaining the user productivity, meanwhile meeting the desired quality metrics (Nielsen, 2012). The term e-Learning system, a learning platform, expresses a wide range of information and communication technology (ICT) system used to deliver learning and teaching processes (Pecheanu et al. 2011). It reduces the training cost in terms of providing less travelling and accommodation, ultimately lowering teaching cost. Amongst a variety of e-Learning systems, OWASP WebGoat is the open source e-Learning system aiming at easing the facilitation of the penetration testing techniques. In this paper we explore the usability issues in WebGoat, so that its future versions can improve on usability aspects.

This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 highlights the related work in the field of usability. Section 3 covers the methodology and is followed by empirical data in section 4. Section 5 wraps up the paper by a conclusion.