E tourism (The global hunter website evaluation) - Research Paper Example

The web page of Senegal-Tourism could be categorized as an example of ICT since it is a technology heavily employed for a certain purpose (i.e., commercial in nature). It must be noted, however, that Carlsson’s concept of ICT is strikingly broad. For one thing, Senegal-Tourism as website or software technology is far from being a “general-purpose technology.” Conversely, Paquette’s idea of ICT is more attuned to the Senegal-Tourism web page mainly because of its prominent relation or connection to such website in terms of strategy, medium, and communication resource.

In the long run, ICTs vitally require a kind of evaluation commonly called heuristic evaluation method. The concept of heuristic evaluation was originally designed by Jakob Nielsen (Reeves & Hedberg, 2003). Mack and Nielsen (1994 as cited in Nielson, 1993) generally defined heuristic evaluation as a method of rigorously inspecting a “user interface design for usability.” Similar to conventional methodology, heuristic evaluation roughly consists of a well-defined set of principles. This set of principles widely varies from the particular type of heuristic evaluation method being used or employed.

In general, heuristic evaluation has ten basic heuristics, which are applicable to any type of software technology; three of the heuristic evaluation methods, to give few examples, are pluralistic walkthroughs, cognitive walkthroughs, and formal design analysis. The methodology called cognitive walkthroughs was mentioned by Nielsen, which he described as one of the two “[o]ther usability inspection methods.” Conyer extensively defined cognitive walkthroughs as a method utilized in order to “evaluate the ease of learning to use a product, particularly by exploration” (as cited in Reeves & Hedberg, 2003).

On the other hand, Nielsen’s heuristic evaluation is essentially a kind of pluralistic walkthroughs. Based from several studies conducted, he concluded that a minimum of three evaluators are needed in order for the heuristic evaluation to be “reasonable” (Neilson, 1993). By and large, using heuristic evaluation method in evaluating certain interface’s usability is advantageous because it is less time-consuming and more cost saving (Reeves & Hedberg, 2003). In evaluating a particular interface or software product, several key concepts or terminologies considerably require definition of terms.

In computer-science jargon, web content could be defined as the textual representation contained in a specific website. Fiore and Tang (2006) implicitly categorized web content, or simply content, as words or group of words -- essentially a paragraph construction -- primarily intended to be placed into one’s “online store.” Content is fundamentally the text seen or viewed on the Site. Text here is, normally, in a form of written text containing, like the human language, codes or signs that have meaning.

Moreover, web content imperatively requires weekly, if not daily, update and upgrade -- what Fiore and Tang called “