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Scope
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The names of the broad categories on the site's homepage are:
ETH at Glance,
Education,
Research,
Services,
In-house Page.
The number of broad categories seems to be enough to cover the major topics.
Very detailed information is reported about a future extension
project of Building at ETH.
Moreover, a remarkable virtual
campus, with a catching graphics and simple text, is developed (ETH World).
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Content
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The english version is very poor (with respect to the other visited sites).
Every page of the web site reports an update reference; only part of the site (Internet part) is frequently updated (maximum August), whereas a great amount of information (Intranet) is not.
A funny annotation: the update of the "Open positions" part traces the top-page to 25 August 1999. Too much!!
Even if the designers of the website (belonging to the ETH internal administration service) are different, in the most of
the portions of the site I have encountered long texts.
For the links, that could be misunderstanding, a good explanation is supplied.
Great amount of information could be requested using email or telephone service.
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Graphic
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In the top-page an appropriate usage of graphic effects is made, but in the subsequent levels I have frequently found long texts.
There is one flaw that just drives me crazy. The space is used in a very "convulsed" way: the main objective of the designer is to reduce different paragraphs just in a single page. The subsequent webspace is certainly an uncomfortable athosphere. But, on the other hand, a great amount of information can be downloaded in a shor time.
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Purpose
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The intended users could be students, administration workers and, in general, most of the professions related to university.
An important remark: the inteded user must be very patient because he/she could waste a lot of time scrolling pages and pages of the same html file. If I had a day to spend, I couldn't visit all the pages on this site, not because there are so many, but because it takes forever for the long texts to read.
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Workability
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Needed information could be freely available thanks to different search engines; in addition, this resource is well organized. A weakness is the low interactive level of the site: I have found no forms or cgi scripts, except in the case of the different search engines.
On the other hand, using simple pages, user doesn't have special hardware/software constraints.
Now I report the results of my personal usability test obtained during the evaluation of this website.
Scores for each questions:
points for question n. 1: 3
points for question n. 2: 2
points for question n. 3: 1
points for question n. 4: 3
Average score:2.5 / 5 Low value!
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Cost
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There are no costs associated with the constents of the site and no online transactions are effected.
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