Usability assessment study of a web site displaying medical resources on line: the CISMeF

We present here the usability assessment study of a medical web site dedicated to the Cataloguing and Indexing of French speaking Medical web Sites (CISMeF). We performed a usability inspection using heuristic evaluation and an empirical usability test using a portable lab. The results of the heuristic evaluation show usability flaws along guidance, prompting and legibility ergonomic criteria. The usability test confirms this result and gives some more hints about the severity rating of the problems. From these results, we draw up a set of recommendations for the re-engineering of the Human Computer Interface (HCI). We conclude on the necessity to integrate usability engineering early enough in the projects lifecycle.