ICS 691 - Fall 2007

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ICS 691 - Fall 2007

Information Architecture
Professor: Dr. Luz M. Quiroga

Information Architecture is a field dealing with the human centered design of web sites. As architects and engineers prepare blueprints of the building they construct, information architects build a sketch of a website based on users requirements and combine functionality, aesthetic, findability and usability elements.

Term Project

Title: Office of Internship and Career Development (OICD), Shidler College of Business

Summary: The Office of Internship and Career Development (hereafter OICD) provides career development services for students and alumni from the Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. Its website (http://career.shidler.hawaii.edu/) was initially launched in spring of 2007 and has received both positive and negative feedbacks through its online survey. Frans Albarillo and William Yip have used a number of research methods to improve the overall information architecture as well as the site organization and navigation. The research results, recommendations, and prototypes are discussed in this final report and are meant to assist the web development team for the redesign of the website in the future.

The report utilizes the “Context, Content, and Users” framework provided by Morville and Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (2006). Their approach to user centered web design and information architecture provides the foundation for research and design of the prototypes proposed.

Downloads:

Report (13,415KB)

Presentation (6,736KB)

Poster (1,246KB)

Blueprints (122KB)

Controlled Vocabularies (41KB)

Wireframes (1,126KB)

Special Topics Research

Title: Google Analytics and Web 2.0

Introduction: Google Analytics is a suite of web-based usage analysis services for developers to collect statistics on their websites. In 2005, Google purchased a web analytics firm named Urchin and began offering the services to the general public free of charge. This was unprecedented. At that time, most companies that provided similar services charged anywhere from two hundred up to several thousand dollars a month. As a result, interests have been overwhelming and Google Analytics has taken a bite out of the market share in web analytics.

There are two different approaches in website usage analysis: log file analysis and page tagging. In log file analysis, a software agent is responsible of analyzing log files that are generated by a web server. The type of transactions recorded in the log files is dependent of the type of web server. In page tagging, each page of the website is tagged with a tracker, or several lines of code, usually written in JavaScript. These lines of code make calls to the remote hosting server (e.g. Google) and record each transaction that the web developers have specified. In page tagging, the type of transaction recorded is independent of the type of web server, as long as the tracker can be embedded on each page. Google Analytics falls into the latter category. It collects statistics including visitor / visit characteristics, traffic sources, and content information.

Web 2.0 is a term that many developers have become familiar with over the past few years. Is Google Analytics the right fit to provide usage statistics on websites that can be categorized as Web 2.0? This report will address some of the limitations of Google Analytics, in related to Web 2.0. It will also provide some suggestions and recommendations on how any usage analysis software can adapt to accommodate the ever-changing web technologies.

Downloads:

Report (47KB)

Presentation (1,370KB)