Scientific Journal of Motaleate-e Tatbighi-e Honar

As the electronic and internet communication grows, the need to desig websites for universities has become more apparent, and attracting the users to these websites and passing information through these websites, has become one of these organizations’ primary goals. As a result, designing Graphical User Interface for these websites plays an important role and identifying design criteria, would be a great help to improve it.

This paper is a study in design problems of websites in the Iranian universities in comparison to common patterns in the websites for successful universities of the world. To reach this goal, from both Iranian and the world’s university websites, some cases have been chosen regarding their scientific and website rankings.  In each category 53 websites from different universities have been taken into account, based on their study departments and location and their visual aspect, like texts, type and size of fonts, colors, images, animated pictures, etc have been studied via a checklist questionnaire with some questions and prepared options. The data has been extracted and presented separately for each category. Then the data has been analyzed with frequency distribution graphs and by the help of Chi square test.

The result of this study indicates that overall, the Iranian and world’s university websites work the same in characteristics such as choosing main and background colors, not using patterns in the backgrounds, way of distinguishing the main links, number and using different sized pictures, dividing the page into three or four columns and avoiding to use music,. The difference though, between universities in Iran and the world is more related to the texts, like using borders around headers, overusing of different typefaces, insufficient diversity of font sizes and short distance between lines in the Iranian websites. In other occasions, Iranian websites, in addition to using slide shows, make use of animated pictures and usually other pages of Iranian’s university websites do not follow the same color and design pattern of the homepage.