@MASTERSTHESIS\{IMM2012-06481,
    author       = "M. Jamil",
    title        = "The Influence of the Usability of a Reputation System on its Utility",
    year         = "2012",
    school       = "Technical University of Denmark, {DTU} Informatics, {E-}mail: reception@imm.dtu.dk",
    address      = "Asmussens Alle, Building 305, {DK-}2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark",
    type         = "",
    note         = "{DTU} supervisor: Christian D. Jensen, cdj@imm.dtu.dk",
    url          = "http://www.imm.dtu.dk/English.aspx",
    abstract     = "Usability, or the “ease of use” of a website, is important in order to allow for a user to carry out the intended task in an efficient and effective manner. For website that uses reputation system, as these chosen in this thesis, such aspect is equally important. But in order to ensure a system which is “Usable” there must be carried out usability activities to that system.
The goal of the thesis was to carry out a usability study on known websites that use reputation system in order to analyze the current level of usability on these websites. By indentifying the level of the usability of these websites it should be possible to present recommendations in order to improve usability in future reputation-based websites. In the thesis there was planned a framework for carrying out the usability study. The proposed framework was based upon various methods available on the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI).
The methods of choice to analyze the level of the usability of the chosen websites were heuristic evaluation based on Nielsen’s heuristics; where each of the heuristics was applied to each website’s reputation system. The second method was the think aloud test; where six test participants have been chosen to do some test tasks, and thereby making it possible to indentify its usability strengths and weaknesses from expert and users point of view.
Based on the usability evaluation we chose three websites that have (the best, natural and worst) usability to conduct another usability study to examine whether the usability has an impact on the overall utility of the reputation system.
The usability methods of choice to analyze the impact the usability of the reputation system on its utility were the interviews and survey.
After the conducted usability approach we found that the level of usability has an influence on how the accessible, utilizable and understandable the reputation information is to the user.
On basis of our findings, we presented some recommendations that should be considered when integrating the reputation systems in the websites."
}