Finding Usability and Communicability Problems for Transactional Web Applications

Today the amount of web applications has grown exponentially and the number of both novice and experienced users decided to experiment with these applications has increased. However, there has been a large increase in problems when the user interacts with those applications. Therefore, a study was made in order to ensure the quality of web applications. To achieve this, a usability methodology for transactional web applications was applied first, where a considerable number of problems identified by Nielsen principles were found and we applied the communicability methods SIM (Semiotic Inspection Method) and CEM (Communicability Assessment Method). During this research two web applications were tested, we found out that there is an association with usability problems, where the 68% to 72% of these problems are about communicability, which turn to be the most serious problems. This shows how difficult is for the designer to interact with the user and vice versa.