Improving Web Information Architecture & International Scientific Visibility

1. Improving Web Information Architecture
&
International Scientific Visibility
University / Higher Education Websites:

2. CONTENTS
1. Questions you may ask yourself
2. Information Architecture
3. Interaction Design
4. Scientific Visibility
5. Conclusions

3. 1. Questions you may ask yourself

4. QUESTIONS YOU MAY ASK YOURSELF
• Your Goals
• Your Challenges
• Your Target Audiences
• Your Analyses

5. STRATEGIC GOALS
• Reach more scientific international visibility?
• Obtain international agreements/
collaboration with reputed universities?
• Improve position on rankings (ARWU, THE,
Webometrics…)?
• Enhance Intranet Knowledge Management?
• Optimize CRM performance?
• … ?

6. TACTICAL GOALS
• More international students?
• More (and better) postgraduate students?
• Contract Highly Cited international Staff?
• Explore e-learning advantages?
• Companies agreements on R&D?
• … ?

7. YOUR GOALS
What do you want from your website? Example:
• More international students

8. YOUR GOALS
Web importance is growing as a source of information for international
students:
• 61% students said that the university’s website was very important when
they made their choice (website answers)
• 52% said that the opinion of someone who had been at this university was
very important (alumni)
• brochures (10%)
• exhibitions (8%)
(Lund University 2008- Sweden)

9. YOUR GOALS
So, when focusing on new students,
ask yourself:
“Why did students choose
my university?”
Gerry McGovern
Carewords Total %
Cumu
% of
Prestigious, well-
recognized degree 187 7% 7
Future job prospects 137 5% 12
Top quality
professors/lecturers 107 4% 16
Career advice 106 4% 19
Top ranking university 101 4% 23
Top ranking course 101 4% 27
Social life 99 4% 30
Nightlife 89 3% 33
Fees 87 3% 37
Postgraduate 80 3% 39
Student-focused 79 3% 42
Course materials 77 3% 45
Societies and clubs 73 3% 48
Faculties 71 3% 50

10. YOUR CHALLENGES
• Budget
• Bias (english dominance)
• Internationalization & Globalization
• Reputation & Credibility
• How the university is perceived
• Get them to where we want

11. YOUR TARGET AUDIENCES
• Prospective students
• Parents & Careers Advisers
• National and international researchers
• Potential customers
• The Media & Community
• Current students
• Staff
• Alumni
• Public Bodies & Government

12. ABOUT TARGET AUDIENCES
• Every potential user group look for different
information
• Same content has different importance for
different groups
• Prioritize contents prominance. How?
• Power law: within target groups / audience
segments / cohorts,
– a few info is searched by many,
– most of info searched by a few.

13. ANALYSIS
J. J. Garrett

14. ANALYSIS - ELEMENTS
Peter Morville

15. ANALYSIS - PROCESS
Evaluation & Iteration
Questionnaires
KPI metricsTests & Prototyping
FEEDBACK
Information Audit

16. ANALYSIS – WHAT?
University goals
and objectives
Competitive
analysis
Tasks Analysis
Audiences
Analysis
User needs
analysis

17. ANALYSIS – HOW?
• End user focus groups
• Card sorting
• Search Analytics
• Web Analytics
• Online/E-mail questionnaire
• User prototypes testing
• Webmaster emails from users requests
• Etc.

18. ANALYSIS – HOW?
When measuring:
• Define who your users are (segmentation)
• Know what your users do on your site
• Understand your users motivations
• Don´t measure to meet your expectations
• Look for patterns
• Find causal relations

19. ANALYSIS - EXAMPLES
Number of prospectus queries per day:
(Manchester Metropolitan University)

20. ANALYSIS - EXAMPLES
Number of prospectus queries per day:
business 10,098
law 9,512
psychology 7,210
fashion 5,660
physiotherapy 4,297
marketing 4,159
teaching 4,141
education 3,903
english 3,789 (Manchester Metropolitan University)

21. 2. Information architecture

22. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Change Management
Support
Process design
Checklists
Vision
Content “Supply” Flow
Performance Mgmt
Benchmarking data
Communications
Template messages
Presentations
Publications
Newsletters/Bulletins
Conferences
Demonstrations
“Success Stories”
FAQ
Training
Classroom study
Workshops
Distance Learning
Self Video/Audio
Train the trainers
On-line job aids
Faculty/Area Based
“Leadership kits”
Incentives +
Rewards Programs
Promotion Events
Frequent User Program
Academy Awards
Contests
Incentive Programs
Career Plan
usaid.gov

23. PUBLISH
THINK
4
Subject Matter ExpertContent 2
CMS
Content Manager
Content 1
Content 3
Functional KM
Team
1
2
GENERATE
3
PREPARE

24. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Whitworth et al.

25. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
• Functional structure, not organizational
• The web team/committee is not the audience
• User always should know:
– where is,
– where has been,
– where is he going

26. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
Let´s do some benchmarking:
• Home page main structures of…
• Five of the better positioned universities in…
• Webometrics.info worldwide ranking
• Looking for matching points, patterns…

27. INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
University portals analyzed:
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Harvard University
- Stanford University
- University of California Berkeley
- Pennsylvania State University

28. According to these Websites, we can
recognize a number of common sections in
large part.
Identifying them with color labels it is possible
to observe content related with
international and promotional aspects.

30. MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology

31. MIT

32. MIT - Main Link Contents Analysis

33. Harvard University

35. Harvard – Main Link Contents Analysis

36. Stanford University

38. Stanford – Main Link Contents Analysis

39. Berkeley – University of California

41. Berkeley - Main Link Contents Analysis

42. Pennsylvania State University

44. Pennsylvania - Main Direct Links and Contents

45. 3. Interaction design

46. INTERACTION DESIGN
• Identify tasks
• Order by user priorities
• Order user priorities by university goals
• Create workflow to get the task done
• Test it & Iterate
• Measure after publishing
• Redesign if necessary

47. INTERACTION DESIGN
J. Racine

48. INTERACTION DESIGN
An example of best practice:
Situation: English speaker graduate interested on studying a PHD
in Netherlands, in Utrech University.

49. 1. Enter in www.uu.nl/

50. 1. Enter in www.uu.nl/
Website is in English. To change to NATIVE
language, you have to choose the option.

51. 2. Look for PhD studies

52. 3. Look for PhD studies

53. 3. Look for PhD studies
International Students MicroSite
Specific and Useful
Information

54. 3. Look for PhD studies

55. 4. HERE WE ARE!

56. 4. HERE WE ARE!
Complete info about how to obtain PhD
Direct access to main contents

57. 4. HERE WE ARE!
And we also have all information for IS visible.

58. 4. Scientific visibility

59. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
• To have a better portal is the beginning, not the end of story
• A better portal is not enough
• Reputation & Credibility comes from every researcher´s
reputation
• Don´t wait the –research- world come to you
• The more links –visibility- to you, the more probability of visits
and goals –tasks- completed.
• Your university research need –always- more visibility

60. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
Webometrics.info

61. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
• The more visibility, the more citations
• Visibility is for:
– best authors who produce…
– best papers, published in…
– best “places” (journals, databases, internet…) to be found in…
– more visible places, which are…
– those with more connections

62. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
Webometrics.info

63. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
Source: Scopus

64. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
It is needed to enhance research visibility. How?
Outside your institution:
• Look for the best researchers (local, national, international)
• Attract international collaboration with better researchers
than yourself

65. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
It is needed to enhance research visibility. How?
Inside your institution:
• Ensure control of your researchers publications
• Measure, Compare and Evaluate
• Give tools to reach more audience quickly.
• The more audience, the more probability of citation

66. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
Control, measure and evaluation of researchers publications to:
• Audit internal researchers publications quality
• Understand your institution research fronts
• Compare them internally and with others
• Set personal and collective strategies
• Improve scientific motivation

67. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
Example: Cites per document (you against…)
Source: Scimago (Scopus)

68. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
It is needed to enhance research visibility. How?
• Give researchers tools to reach more audience quickly.
• The more audience, the more probability of citation
How?

69. SCIENTIFIC VISIBILITY
• Publish in better impact factor Journals
• Publish in OAI (Open Access Initiative) journals
• Upload preprints, etc., to OAI repositories
• Think on Scholar SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at paper level.
• Work around general and specialized social networks
• Connect all actions (offline and online)

70. 5. CONCLUSIONS

71. CONCLUSIONS
• Set your strategic goals
• Audit (diagnostics) first
• Segment your audience
• Analyze, measure, evaluate KPIs and production
• Make it a commitment all organization members (KM)
• Ensure everybody helps (Change management)
• Organize contents by tasks, not by organizational chart.
• The portal is not an island (visibility)
• Give tools to your people & researchers
• Think OAI / Scholar SEO & Social Media

72. 72
Jorge Serrano-Cobos
jorge@masmedios.com
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