Website Quality Assessment Instrument for School Choice Websites: The Case of SAE in Chile

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-803-0_26How to use a DOI?

Keywords

School choice; website quality; heuristic evaluation; SAE

Abstract

Centralized school choice platforms have significantly transformed the school application process, forcing families to transition from physical applications to unified digital ecosystems. This scenario demands new and complex digital and informational literacy skills. Academic literature consistently suggests that the content, usability, and information architecture in these systems directly influence parental attitudes, stress levels, and decision-making. This article details the methodological development of a website quality assessment instrument specifically designed for centralized school choice platforms, based on expert heuristic analysis and a functional approach. To achieve this, we integrated techniques of systematic literature review, analysis of international benchmarks, and the formulation of a sociodemographic user archetype based on web analytics and a survey. This instrument was empirically validated through its application to the School Admission System (SAE, for its acronym in Spanish) of the Chilean Ministry of Education. The results demonstrated the instrument’s effectiveness in evaluating specific domains, detecting that, although the analyzed ecosystem fulfills operational algorithmic functions, it presents opportunities for improvement: the informational site only achieved 51% overall compliance and the transactional platform 61%, evidencing gaps in accessibility, interoperability, audiovisual content, inclusion, multilingualism, and online assistance, generating potential cognitive barriers and user experience problems for parents and guardians.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Alejandro Morales-Vargas
AU  - Cristian Cabalin
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/16
TI  - Website Quality Assessment Instrument for School Choice Websites: The Case of SAE in Chile
BT  - Proceedings of the VI International Conference on Communication and Applied Technologies 2026 (ICOMTA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 279
EP  - 285
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-803-0_26
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-803-0_26
ID  - Morales-Vargas2026
ER  -