Rediff most user friendly among horizontal portals - JuxtConsult

JuxtConsult has released a study rating and ranking the various websites according to their user-friendliness

The internet research firm, JuxtConsult has released 'Website User Friendliness and Usage Satisfaction' Study, an online survey to evaluate the user-friendly nature of various portals. The syndicated survey was conducted by JuxtConsult through an online poll on the basis of 19 parameters.

The 19 categories were laid down on the basis of four main criteria – ease of access, ease of usage, design appeal and usage satisfaction.

Rediff most user friendly among horizontal portals - JuxtConsult

The main criteria evaluated the websites on the following features like 'accessibility', 'likeability' (to find out the user experience on the website), 'relatability' (to see whether the content available on the website is apt), 'navigability', 'interactivity' and 'task accomplishment'. For the 'task accomplishment' criteria, the respondents were assigned a particular task on the website to find out whether the user is able to perform the task effectively and quickly. The survey had queries based on this criteria. The sample size of the survey was 8000 online respondents.

The Website User Friendliness (WUF) Index tested websites under five categories – generic portals, job portals, travel portals, online financial information websites and online shopping.

The generic portals tested in the survey included – Yahoo, MSN, Rediff, Indiatimes, Sify and AOL. JuxtConsult's WUF Index rates Rediff as the topmost among the the other websites getting 7.04 on the WUF Index followed by Yahoo (6.88), Indiatimes (6.54), Sify (6.38), AOL (6.21) and MSN (5.37).

In the online travel websites' category, Cleartrip.com emerged first on the WUF Index with 10.4, followed by MakeMyTrip and Yatra (both 8.9), Travelguru (8.0) and Indiatimes Travel (7.0). In the online financial information category, Religare was the top-rated website getting 8.64 on the WUF Index. The other websites tested in the category were MoneyControl (7.78), ShareKhan (7.21), ICICIDirect (6.39) and MyIris (6.06).

In the online shopping category, eBay (10.9) was the top-ranked site. Other websites tested included Rediff Shopping (9.8), Indiatimes Shopping (9.0), Future Bazaar and Indiaplaza (both 8.3). Among the job portals tested, Naukri (8.27) was the top-ranked portal and others included Clickjobs (7.86), Monster (7.84), JobStreet (6.75) and TimesJobs (6.50).

“One of the most critical factors for a website is to be 'user friendly' basically to have a friendly interface to 'look friendly' and friendly experience to 'behave friendly'. Portals can evaluate, compare, benchmark and rank various aspects of their user friendliness and most importantly take decisions on a quarterly basis for building on their strengths and overcoming their weaknesses around website user-friendliness,” says Mrutyunjay, co-founder, JuxtConsult says.

The survey was conducted on JuxtConsult's online user panel website – getcounted.net.

Have news to share? Write to us atnewsteam@afaqs.com

JuxtConsult Mrutyunjay Mishra