Investigating website appearance and usability effects on student satisfaction with the website: a descriptive analysis in three countries

As a consequence of the recent progress of virtual learning environments at universities, there are many theoretical and empirical studies focused on analyzing whether the website design or rather the personal characteristics of the students, are the most influential factors on their satisfaction. However, it is very important to differentiate the impact of these factors in order to improve the student satisfaction in the classroom. This paper deals with a topic relating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) usage in Higher Education and particularly website design. An experiment was carried out based on a questionnaire to collect data and a factorial design for evaluating the relationship between website appearance and usability on student satisfaction. Besides, gender is considered as a moderator of this relationship with the aim of finding the best combination of the website design for each group of students. The total number of students in this experiment was 543 and the results here presented are part of an international research which involved institutions from Mexico, Portugal and Spain. In this paper a wide spatial representation of cross-sectional nature has been obtained, and it is concluded that website appearance and usability, as well as gender of the students, are very relevant on satisfaction in the learning process of the students. The main contribution of this paper is to show the usefulness of these results in several groups of students with very similar academic and professional circumstances worldwide.