Published Paper Details:

The usability and the user interface of a publisher website is an important component to determine the performance and functioning. For the past two decades, right after introducing of heuristic evaluation principles by Nielsen (1990), it has been implemented to measure the usability of various kinds of websites. The user interfaces and usability of book publisher was the subject of some research studies and many evaluation techniques have developed to assess publisher's websites user interfaces. This study is to evaluate the user interface of the top ten book publishers' websites which are based on the rankling by the "Publishers Weekly", a weekly news magazine focused on the international book publishing business by applying the ten heuristics evaluation principles (Nielsen 1990). The study engages a quantitative and qualitative based survey approaches, and seeks to gather the perception and experiences of Pondicherry University students of post-graduate and PhD students about the book publishers' websites. The results of the study shows that users liked the publishers' websites user interface as most of them were attractive due to pleasant layout, the use of simple language consistently throughout the system and the use of standards in all areas across the WebPages. The main weaknesses of the publishers websites as per the experience and perception of the respondents were lack of adequate and appropriate feedback, inadequate users control features, limited online help, slow loading due to some websites used heavy graphics and multimedia contents.