APPENDIX A

Appendix A ​

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This link provides the data we have collected in our website analysis and provides context for the following section. 

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Website Analysis

Our team then conducted a website analysis of 17 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, our team 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 iSchools. 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 then decided to analyze 20 schools, but a time conflict only allowed for 17. We firmly believe our scores represent the quality of iSchool 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

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Based on these heuristics, we gave each category a score of one to five, and several categories receiv33ed 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 was 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. 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.

 

An example of our scoring sheet can be seen in Figure (x.x in methodology

 

Based on this data, we have compiled the scores into charts to visualize which schools were the best based on their informatics school websites.