Ecole Polytechniche Lousanne

The names of the broad categories on the site's homepage are: looking for..., executive board ..., life on campus, Eduacation, Research, Collaborations and partnership, Administration, News&events. This site contains a very large amount of information and the publication date is often reported. All the university activities with foreign institute are reported.
The provided information not always results complete: the glorious history of this Ecole is reduced to an half webpage of text; I think that more infomation should be presented in order to set off the past splendour.

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Information seems to be very accurate, but a little bit serious (not an effective way to maintain user's attention).
In the link section, the values of the sites don't lie in their links.
Too much pages are under construction: in my opinion, a 'void' link should be not active during the construction of the related pages.
The only way to obtain information is the net (email, form, ...). The webmaster can be easily contacted by email, but there are not personal information about the authors.

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This homepage is stunning. I get the score of my life. But after recovering from the shock, I see that good graphic design is shown only for the first 2 levels; after the second level the pages become longer, not easly readable. The aim to catch the user's attention (for the first 2 minutes) is achieved, but the chosen graphics is certainly not coherent: especially for the reports supplied on the web, I have found an explosion of arbitrary colors.
A riddle: In the english (or french) version of the site, the top-page's image reports smiling faces of 3 students; whereas in the german version, there is a researcher with a staid attitude. Why?

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This web site seems a presentation of EPFL rather than information web service. Sometimes even the presentation is not so wonderful (see Picture of the EPFL campus).

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Nothing out of the ordinary. The site is easy to navigate because the navigation tools are consistently placed. In some cases, there is just a little too much text on the pages to make me feel comfortable.
The resource seems to be well organized: the first impression is that the user can easily find the needed information in a short time. But, let me report you the surprising results of my personal usability test, obtained during the evaluation of this website.
Scores for each questions:
points for question n. 1: 1
points for question n. 2: 1
points for question n. 3: 1
points for question n. 4: 1
Average score: 1
Important remark: the search engine doesn't work neither well nor fast.

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There are no costs associated with the use of the site. The light design enhances the speed of connection.

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