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Members of the Information Access Division (IAD) in ITL are developing methodologies to measure the usability of Websites. Empirical evidence from research and commercial sources indicates that websites suffer from a lack of usability. Measuring usability of websites is more complicated than measuring usability in desktop applications. Part of the difficulty is due to defining what 'typical users' and 'typical tasks' are, given the diverse audience of users. A second difficulty relates to the wide variety of measurement methodologies that are the repertoire of the usability engineer. Another major confounding factor is that websites are dynamic, i.e., there are day-to-day, minute-to-minute, and query-to-query differences in the content of sites.

To address these issues, the Information Access Division has undertaken a project called CIFter (Common Industry Format for Testing usability Evaluation Reports). For the first CIFter study, we worked closely with web designers at The Motley Fool to extract a static snapshot of their dynamic website at The Motley Fool, and developed a list of user tasks. We then recruited approximately 10 groups of usability evaluators to begin the CIFter study. A CD with the website snapshot, tasks and NIST Web Metrics tools was released to the evaluators on December 31, 2000. The results of their evaluations will be submitted to NIST in the next 6 months and will be analyzed to determine the value of using such collections to derive benchmarks of usability engineering methodologies.