VETS Audience Analysis & Site Strategy

Author: Markus Stobbs
Date: 6-04-02

Introduction

The purpose of this document is to identify the different audiences we serve with the VETS website and develop a strategy for how we will serve their individual and shared needs better with a redesigned site. We will look briefly at current traffic to the VETS website to better understand current usage patterns. We will then look at our goals and mission for the site. Then we will segment our audiences, look at their different needs, and think about how we can serve them better. Finally, we will integrate all this work into several strategies to choose from for how we design and structure our site.

Traffic Analysis

May 2002 traffic shows that 26% of SCD traffic is educational, and probably represents our main audience. Commercial, network and unresolveable domains make up 57% of our traffic, and are impossible to break down by user without an online survey. It's likely that many educational users are also included in this number, surfing from their ISP account rather than from school. Roughly 12% of our traffic is from other countries, 2% from the U.S. Government, while military and non-profits are each under 1%.

The most popular pages in SCD are listed below. I have included Windows to the Universe, UCAR, and NCAR home page stats to provide a sense of the larger context in which our site dwells. Note that we are looking at individual page stats here, not overall site stats. We're trying to get to a sense of the number of visitors to each section of the site. The visits statistic is the closest thing we have to that. It was not available for the VETS site in the Webalizer report, but it seems to be roughly half the number of page views on average.

Visits is calculated by discarding hits to a page from the same IP address within the same 30 minute time period and is therefore not absolutely accurate. In fact, I highly doubt it's relevance for high traffic pages. For instance, the UCAR home page has 1/8th the visits compared to page views rather than the average of 1/2. Windows to the Universe has 1/15th the visits. The weakness of this visits algorithm is that it doesn't accurately account for individuals from institutions that substitute a main gateway or proxy IP address for all outgoing HTTP requests, especially when that institution is large enough that multiple users are likely to be browsing our site at the same time from that location. Therefore for pages with over 10,000 page views a month, I recommend halving page views to come up with a more meaningful estimate.*

Interesting highlights are that the NETS, DSS, and News sections of SCD get more traffic than VETS. The Clark Fire page in VETS is actually more popular than our main page, underlining the importance of getting other sites to link directly to relevant content. However, since that page does not link back to our main site, it is also one of our most popular exit pages. We are not encouraging these visitors to explore our site in more depth.

With only 454 page views for the VETS home page for May, we clearly have some work to do to increase our visibility and traffic.

Traffic Growth Strategies

There are a number of ways we can grow our audiences and traffic:

• Partnering with Windows to the Universe to create a visualizations area on that site
• Encouraging news media, science, and education sites to feature specific visualizations (like the fire page)
• Featuring our content periodically on the UCAR, NCAR and SCD home pages to increase awareness of our subsite
• Optimize our pages to sort higher in search engine results. Google text and image search are 2 of our top referrers.

Site Mission and Goals

What is our mission for the site? What goals do we have in publishing our work and describing what we do? The answers to these questions are critical for guiding the design and content development process, and for creating a site which accomplishes real objectives.

Mission:

• Provide a central location for scientists to connect to data, software, and collaborative environments that enable them to further their research
• Showcase the power of scientific visualization
• Establish VETS as an authority on 3D scientific visualization and collaborative technologies
• Educate the public about atmospheric science and scientific visualization

Goals:

• Double VETS monthly page views within 3 months of new site launch
• Increase VETS monthly page views by a factor of 5 within 1 year of new site launch
• Create a portal for scientists to find data and software relevant to their research
• Evangelize and provide access to collaborative technologies
• Develop a visualization database search capability
• Create a complete picture of the VETS group and our work
• Create articles on 3D scientific visualization

Audiences

Our intended audiences fall into the following segments:

We can collapse these into 3 main audiences:

Based on 26% of our traffic being from .edu addresses, as well as our personal experience with contact from users, we are making the assumption that our primary audience is atmospheric scientists and graduate students. Although we are contacted occasionally by grade 3-12 teachers, our content is fairly complex in its subject matter, and we are much more likely to be a resource for individuals involved in the field of atmospheric research.

UCAR and NCAR employees is broken out as a separate audience even though their needs are similiar to atmospheric scientists and graduate students. This is mainly because we need to account for the unique needs of some employees, such as web engineers who need access to our web engineering resources, employees looking for staff information and current projects, as well as NCAR internal information and resources that will be published on our intranet site, VETS Internal. All of this information will be subsidiary to the offerings to our primary audience on the home page. We hope to use only 10% of our home page real estate for employee-specific information.

We currently have very little educational content for the general public, K-12, and undergraduate students. This is also seen as the mission of the UOP Education & Outreach group, so we will work with them to serve our content to that audience with supplemental educational material as their web plans develop. Our home page will still have some appeal to the general public and students since the visualizations have a wow factor all their own. However, we will not specifically target this audience with science education content.

Strategy

To serve the diverse needs of this many audiences, we will need a home page which provides each audience with a clear path to the content that meets their needs. There are a variety of strategies for accomplishing this.

Since we do not currently have educational content and plan to help Education & Outreach rather than develop such content ourselves, the science education and audience-specific strategies are not realistic site strategy options. The audience-specific strategy is more appropriate for the main NCAR site given its larger scope of content for multiple audiences.

We collapsed our audience segments into 3 groups with our primary audience being atmospheric scientists and graduate students. UCAR/NCAR employees have very similiar needs to this group and will require a small amount of real estate on the home page to address their additional unique needs. Since we are not specifically targeting the 3rd group of the general public and students, the scientist portal strategy seems to be the ideal strategy. While the intermingled (fast-launch) strategy is also a possible fit, it doesn't provide the focus and clarity of the scientist portal strategy. We will have a more powerful web presence by devoting ourselves to the needs of our primary audience.