Evaluate effectiveness of web design through information search task:
University web site & search for its academic specialties

Universities are increasingly using the web to communicate information to students, fellow colleagues, and broader communities. Prospective students, for example, interested in learning about a University are likely to explore the web sites of those they are considering attending. A key concern to (at least some) students is to learn about disciplines available for study. Clearly it would benefit the prospective student as well as the University if this information is easily accessible, and understandable. Testing a person on alternative designs of University web pages can help determine which are effective. The 'searcher' being evaluated would need to be relatively naive to the University's disciplines and their web sites, and have the goal of learning about particular disciplines offered by the University.

One web-evaluation demo that I constructed, with this goal in mind, focuses on 'Search for Biology information' on a Rutgers University web site. I selected 'Biological Science' as the discipline because Rutgers has a complex organizational structure where various schools and departments are home to various subdiscipines of Biology. The challenge for web designers here would be to determine an effective way to coordinate the diverse programs so that a prospective biology major would get an accurate impression of the disciplines offered by Rutgers .You might want to take a look at the Rutgers site and see how rapidly you can find information about its Biological programs. Here is a test video of me doing this search through a handful of rutgers web pages.

D.J. Aks -- 8/29/06

|D.J. Aks | Eye-tracking research | System noise | Time series & fractal analysis | Visual search | Attention | Satellite Imagery | Tumor detection | Web eval & info search | Illusions