Advancements in University of Waterloo's Web should be grounded in solid research. We need to:
- develop a better understanding of what our clients are looking for and what difficulties they are encountering;
- ensure that our content providers understand who their audience is;
- make use of tools like web analytics and usage tracking devices (e.g. cookies) to help understand who the users are and how we are reaching them;
- allocate resources to improving sites that are of critical importance;
- conduct usability studies to develop a better understanding of user experience and requirements.
From Gary Ridley: Math Faculty Computing Facility (MFCF) is preparing plans to do web based surveys with its research related customers to determine what technology, supports, use they put the equipment, software and support we provide to. It is not directly aimed at determining what use they put the Math web site to but undoubtedly will have some influence on development of the web site(s) as well. The issue of determining what use our clients put our websites to, how they access it and what they are trying to find seems to me to be timely and relevant as the stats I keep for Math websites have shown that mobile browsers are in (barely) the top 100 of the list of browsers that access our web sites. This indicates to me that times are changing, access methods are changing and accessibility for all types of browsers more important.
From Paul Snyder: We have a keyword facility similar to the one on University of Waterloo's home page. We've found it useful in seeing what people are most often looking for and what they are not able to find in our keywords. We've made changes to make more popular items more easily visible and have added keywords and links to respond to the unsuccessful searches.
From Kelley Teahen: Volunteer surveys of current clients/customers are good, but we need to move forward too with more-detailed testing and information-gathering from key audiences, both external and internal, with an audience (not so much "client") focus. The client, to me, is the University of Waterloo person or group creating the page, who is supported by our services; the audience is "who is this for? who's reading and using it?" We also need good reporting on the competition: best practices of university web design, much of which is coming from the U.S. at the moment. Check out http://www.edustyle.net/ for some current examples.