Aziza

Participants

• CSDL: Anne Disney, Jarrett Lee, Tuan Huynh, Jennifer Saito

Problem

CSDL was unhappy with its previous web site and had commissioned the Aziza Group (691 Web Development Team) to design and implement a new web-site. At the same time that the site was being developed, the group was to research and investigate the process and life-cycle of World Wide Web site development in general.

CSDL was unhappy with its previous web site and had commissioned the Aziza Group (691 Web Development Team) to design and implement a new web-site. At the same time that the site was being developed, the group was to research and investigate the process and life-cycle of World Wide Web site development in general.  

The goal for the Aziza group was to develop a professional Research & Development web site for the University of Hawaii, Collaborative Software Development Laboratory. The development of this web site can be chronologically divided into 5 major stages:

1. Planning
2. Design
3. Development
4. Construction
5. Testing/Evaluation

Please see the technical report, Investigating the Design and Evaluation of Research Web Sites, for a detailed discussion on our approach and method of developing this web site.

The main product of the Aziza research project was this web-site. In terms of web-sites, there are two different ways to evaluate their effect and effectiveness. One way is to look at the aesthetic and content aspects of the site and the other way is look at the technical aspects of the site, such as spelling, broken links, and orphaned pages.
Site-user interviews were used to evaluate the site's aesthetic and content aspect and various web-based utilities, such as WebTester 1.05 and WebSter's Dictionary 2.0, were used to evaluate the technical aspects.

1. Main page: The main/top page provides six major sections with over 50 links. It is now up to date with double the number of research projects. It also provides "first class" status to members, affiliates, and software tools produced by the site, providing a much fuller representation of the mission, products, and relationships of CSDL with other groups.
2. Java tools:The new site is designed to enable CSDL java-based tools to be used from a browser-based interface.
3. Search: The current web site has a nice search facility with pre-built keywords to efficiently guide users through CSDL's site.
4. Tool/Research distinction: This site makes a critical structural and semantic distinction between the tools produced by CSDL and the research produced by CSDL that may involve these tools. They are the two wholly different concepts and issues in CSDL's research and development
5. Navigation: The current button-based navigation bar can take you to any of the six major sections regarding CSDL's activities and research.
6. Information layering: Each navigational pages contains subject information while providing a finer grain of detail correspondent to the depth of the navigational page.
7. This site provides a sense of historical place of individual research projects within CSDL. As CSDL grows older and develops a research history, visitors need to know this kind of information.
8. Page format: There are template structures for each type of information (research project, software tool, member page), which helps ensure completeness and consistency of information. In addition, the research template is consistent with the ISERN format.
9. Design evaluation: This site contains an evaluation of its design and effectiveness, thus making itself a research project.  

Investigating the Design and Evaluation of Research Web Sites, Anne Disney, Jarrett Lee, Tuan Huynh, and Jennifer Saito, May, 1998.

As always, a web-site is continually developing and growing, so the project will never be truly complete. There is only the hope that with further development, this site will become something better than it was.