The CIFter Project was created by a project team of the Visualization and Usability Group* at The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to promote the investigation and development of ways to evaluate and benchmark methodologies for assessing the usability of websites. CIFter is a compound acronym. The CIF is the Common Industry Format for reporting the results of usability studies with users. The "ter" refers to the "Testing of usability Evaluation Reports".

There are two goals for the project:

1. To identify web usability practices that are efficient, economical, and effective base on evaluations of test websites.
2. To use the results of the evaluations to create a benchmarks against which future evaluations of a CIFter test website can be compared.

The first CIFter study was created in collaboration with Wayne Gray of George Mason University and The Motley Fool. The CIFter test website is a frozen-in-time version of The Motley Fool website. Participant evaluators have volunteered to evaluate the site by conducting a summative evaluation of the frozen website contained on the CD. The testing methodology and the test results will be reported using the Common Industry Format (CIF).

For background about this project, see the Bibliography.

* The Visualization and Usability Group (VUG) is part of the Information Access Division (IAD) of the Information Technology Lab ( ITL).