Developing Best Practice in Intranet Evaluation: A Comparison of Evaluation Models for Usability and Acceptance

Usability is an important element of why users accept an information system. Heuristic evaluation is a common method of usability evaluation often performed by independent consultants in the assessment of organisational intranets. However, there are other usability models which offer valuable analysis in the evaluation process. This paper empirically compares the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Hedonic/Utilitarian (HED/UT) scale versus a heuristic evaluation model as additional measures of intranet usability. As such this paper attempts to develop best practice in Intranet evaluation by assessing the strength of traditional heuristic evaluation constructs and those proposed by the TAM and HED/UT models. A unified evaluation toolset is proposed by the authors for practitioner use.