Introduction and Methodology

The methodology provides a list of steps and processes our team took to gain knowledge on the clients scope. Digital research was the team’s first step and began with devising a list of keywords. Once the team became knowledgeable on the subject of the scope, a website analysis system was created to analyze other informatics school websites and compare them to SOIC’s website.

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Research

Our team began our search using keywords that related to our client’s scope and some hypotheses we developed. Primarily the databases our team searched was the IUPUI University Library’s link to ProQuest and EBSCO. To provide additional perspectives, we searched for non-academic research to gain an understanding of what efforts are being made in the business realm. We then created a list of keywords that would yield research relating most to our scope. Some include: 

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Keywords

·      “recruitment”

·      “web design”

·      “AI chat bots”

·      “college recruiting”

·      “Informatics”

·      “persuasive communication”

·      “organizational strategies”

·      “Recuitment strategies”

·      “Website recruitment”

·      “college website recruitment”

 

These keywords were derived also from hypotheses we developed as possible solutions to our client’s scope or based on prior research. When our team found research that related to the scope or hypotheses, it would be added to our annotated bibliography and analysis would be done on the most relevant pieces.

 

Website Analysis

Our team then conducted a website analysis of 20 informatics schools to better understand how SOIC compares with others in the industry, and pinpoint what works well and what can be improved.  To do this, Pranav created a spreadsheet that was formatted based on heuristics developed by Huan Rong at Uppsala Universitet for evaluating online recruitment websites. While these heuristics by Rong provided a good base for evaluating recruitment websites, we felt that some heuristics should be modified to better fit informatics schools. Initially, we planned on analyzing 50 schools. We soon discovered this was too ambitious based on the amount of schools and how detailed our criteria was. We firmly believe our scores represent the quality of informatics school websites and it provides a good basis to compare SOIC to.

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Finalized Heuristics

·      Layout Hierarchy

·      Unified Format

·      Exciting Display

·      Highlights Important Content

·      Avoid Excessive Effort

·      Helper for Explanation

·      Up to date information

·      Ease of finding a contact form/page

·      Social media links present and Easy to Find

 

Based on these heuristics, we gave each category a score of one to five, and several categories received a score for their Home, General Informatics, Undergrad, and Career pages that would be tallied up for the category. However, the categories that we did not do this for were Unified Format, Contact Form and Social Media Links because these typically were the same for the entire site and do not change from page to page. An example of our scoring sheet can be seen in Figure (1.1) The aim of this analysis was to give each school a score tallied from all the categories based on the heuristics we determined would fairly “grade” each website and allow us to compare each site to IUPUI’s SOIC website. To normalize results, we discussed best practices when scoring. These best practices included ensuring the team understood what each criteria meant, and removing bias from the equation. Furthermore, a team member provided a second score for each informatics school and our results were averaged between both scores.

 

Helper for Explanation Category

One of the categories we included was “Helper for Explanation”. This category included multiple features that help in understanding the website’s contents. These features included: video, interactive images, GIFs, FAQs page, sidebar help dialog, or an AI helper. While most websites did not have an AI helper, the websites that did gained an extra point. This helps reward websites that went above and beyond in our scoring system, while not detracting from the other heuristic scores considering the purpose of an informatics school website is not built on the purpose of showcasing AI.