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