Thursday, November 30, 2006

So What's It All Mean? Part 2 - Most Viewed Pages

A discussion of the most commonly viewed pages on the CSU, Chico Web site.

This post is based on this analysis.

In some ways there is less to learn from the list of most viewed pages than there is from the most popular searches.

For one thing, many of these pages are buried deep within the hierarchy and are part of specific courses. Certainly, "Skull Model" (#14) and "Indian Caste System" (#17) are parts of very popular courses. The Skull Model has been around for years and has always been a highly viewed page.

One thing that is new is the rise of social networking pages, like "Progressive Students Union WIKI" (#2) and "Taiwanese Students Association" (#8, #19). Pages like these aren't part of the "official campus web presence" that is somewhat centrally maintained. So, though they are an important part of what is going on on campus, they aren't about to appear on the home page any time soon.

What's left is pretty much the usual suspects; library, class schedule, campus directory, catalog, etc. Student Computing is prominent, but that's because all of their labs computers use that as a home page.

There are a number of "deep link" pages in the top 30 most viewed pages. Some of these, like "Job Opportunities" (#21) are important enough to consider placing on the home page. However, most of the deep links can be reached via from the home page via a main page link (e.g., "Athletics - Baseball" can be reached from the "Athletics" link on the home page). The only real anomoly is the "Career Planning - Cover Letter Examples" page (#6). This page might have been used in a course or other activity, so without hard evidence I'd hesitate to consider placing a link to this on the home page.

Overall, based on the analysis, most of the bases are covered with respect to having the most viewed pages linked from the home page.

So What's It All Mean? Part 1 - Search Terms

A discussion of what to do about the most commonly searched for terms on the CSU, Chico Web site.

I'm a big advocate of the school of thought that says that your most popular search term is your hardest to find page. In other words, if people prefer to browse first and search after a browse fails (see this post), then a large portion of searches are for things that they couldn't find via browsing.

So, what does that mean? Should we put big flashing links for campus map, transcripts, and financial aid on the home page?

Maybe it does.

These are obviously high demand pages and should have high visibility. Of the top 30 search terms, only eight had visible links on the home page (campus map, class schedule, athletics, bookstore, portal, Orion, library, and catalog).


When you look at the placement of these eight links, you can see that all of them are either in the lower part of the page, or use very small text (or both in the case of "campus map").

Five of the links occur in the "photo/link" strip toward the bottom of the page, suggesting that perhaps this bar either is not highly visible or does not communicate effectively the fact that there are links there.

In any case, none of these links are prominently placed on the page, and this probably contributes to their popularity as search terms.

Another seven popular search terms appeared in the blue pop-up menus on the home page (financial aid, housing, jobs, academic calendar, records and registration, human resources, and associated students), indicating that the pop-up menus perhaps don't get as much use as we would like.

So overall 15 of the top 30 searches appear some place on the home page, but none of them have a high visibility.

Recommendations
I don't actually recommend big flashing links on the home page, but I do recommend that we take a closer look at who is doing the searching and whom the home page is serving.

A close look at who is likely doing the searching reveals the following about the top 57 search terms (based on this post):

Likely Searchers Terms Percent
Current Student 54 95%
Prospective Student 20 35%
Community 6 11%
Staff 5 9%
Alumni 3 5%
Faculty 3 5%

If, in fact, current students are likely to be searching for 54 of the top 57 terms, then I think it becomes clear that they are the major audience for our home page as it exists. It doesn't have to stay that way, of course. Humboldt State redesigned their home page to be a marketing tool for recruiting new students. That's great, but right now I think it's clear that current students are doing searches more than all other groups combined and would most benefit from a redeveloped home page.

IF the goal of the home page remains to serve current students, then a reorganization of the link structure to increase the visibility of the most popular search terms is an obvious idea.

How to do it?
Some campuses put a list of "Quick Links" on their home pages (University of Michigan, Princeton, for example); a list of supposedly popular links. But I'm not a fan of these for the same reason I'm not a fan of FAQ pages: it's an unorganized grab bag of stuff and there is no apparent reason for me to expect that what I'm looking for will be there. The "information scent" is too faint for me to want to go down that trail. In the case of the U Mich site, they at make them all visible (though they're in no discernible order).

Personally, I'm more of a fan of the approach that the University of Florida takes, which is to have main headings with a list of popular links below it, reminiscent of the old Yahoo! home page. Western Washington University does something similar. In fact, I suggested something similar during the last redesign in 2003:

What's the advantage?
The advantages of this approach IMO are:

  1. Links are part of a clear organizational structure (e.g., "campus map" could go under "About Chico State") instead of a haphazard list-o'-links.
  2. Links are plainly visible on the page without having to click on a "Quick Links" list or a pop-up menu.

The challenge is coming up with an organizational structure that includes as many of the high profile search terms as possible.

However, page structures like this have fallen out of favor in recent years, probably because people think that pop-up menus are more effective. This is certainly true from a space usage perspective, but I'm not actually convinced that this is the case from a findability perspective. My feeling is that pop-up menus are OK if the user knows they are there and if the menus are short and clear enough to be quickly scannable, but otherwise may actually reduce findability by making links on the home page less visible.

This is just one idea, and I'm sure that there are other ways to do this that present the links as part of an organized scheme and doesn't hide them in a drop-down list or pop-up menu somewhere.

Another Approach for Campus Map
The University of Wisconsin has put a link to their interactive campus map in a very prominent place on the home page, using an icon to draw attention. For something is as high demand as the campus map (and something that lends itself to a visual representation), this is not a bad approach. This wouldn't work for everything, of course, because the page would be littered with icons, but for the campus map (which is a perennial favorite), the idea has some merit and would make it clearly stand out.

Search vs. Browse

Insane babblings about why people use search instead of browsing, and visa versa.


Why do people use search instead of browsing or visa versa? We'll I'm sure that there are studies out detailing why, but I prefer to wing it based solely on opinion with no facts to support me. So here are my reasons why people prefer searching:

  1. They think it's quicker (but will try browsing if searching fails)
  2. They know exactly what they're looking for
  3. They don't trust (or have had a bad experience with) the site's browsing architecture
  4. They want to get instant results without a lot of steps (this is a combination of 1, 2, and 3)

Ultimately (particularly for a younger audience who are a) more web savvy, and b) want instant results without intermediary steps) searching is about getting to the desired information as quickly as possible without having to make decisions and without thinking about choices. This approach is referred as teleporting. Whether or not this is a good thing I'll leave to others to debate.

However, "The Perfect Search Engine Is Not Enough: A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search" (now I'm starting to do my research) suggests just the opposite, that people tend to browse first and search only when that fails, and that people tend to return to browsing (or "orienteering") even after a successful search.

One interesting paper (Effects of Scent and Breadth on Use of Site-Specific Search on E-Commerce Web Sites) found that the decision of a user to use search or browse approaches to finding information depended on several things, including:

  • How clearly organized and labeled a site's menu system was ("information scent")
  • How prominent search and browse areas were
  • The user's inclination to search or browse

Here's an article that summarizes the two papers mentioned above - that I found only after I found the other two.

The Upshot
What's the upshot of all this for administrators and others trying to plan a new website?

My take on it is this: If it's true that people prefer to browse (I plan to test this hypothesis), then we need to make absolutely certain that our site structure is extremely clear, well-designed, intuitive and easy to use. As Katz and Byrne say, "providing site search should not be used to compensate for poor menu design, and provide[s] further evidence regarding the design of effective menu structures."

Let's face it, a perfect search engine would always give you exactly what you wanted the first time every time. If that happened, no site would even have a menu; they'd all look like the Google home page.

But search engines aren't perfect for several reasons (ambiguity of terms, lack of context, limited algorithms, and poor labeling being just a few). And if people prefer to use menu systems over search, it is a condemnation of the ability search engines to return desired results, because we all know how poorly organized most menu systems are.

People are choosing the lesser of two evils in this case. And though there are a few things we can do to improve search results, we have much less control over that than we do over the information architecture and menu systems of our sites.

References
Katz, M. A. and Byrne, M. D. (2003). Effects of Scent and Breadth on Use of Site-specific Search on E-Commerce Web Sites. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 10(3) pp 198-220. (Link)

Teevan, J., Alvarado, C., Ackerman, M. and Karger, D. (2004). The perfect Search Engine is not Enough: A Study of Orienteering Behavior in Directed Search. Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004, pp. 415-4422. (Link)

Wednesday, November 29, 2006

Home Page Structure of the Top 20 Sites

Analysis of the layout, structure and space usage on the top 20 university home pages.

I was curious as to what were the most common page elements on the top 20 sites. How many sites included news or events or welcome messages, as well as how many used left hand navigation vs. top navigation, etc. The following analysis breaks down my findings.

Most Common Page Elements

ElementPercent of Sites
Search Box100%
Photos100%
Top Banner90%
News85%
Copyright Notice75%
Left Navigation70%
Feature/Spotlight55%
Quick Links45%
Top Navigation35%
Contact Info30%
Events30%
Right Navigation15%
Inside "University"15%
Directory10%
Announcements10%
Calendar5%
Visit5%
Recruitment5%


Surprisingly, a search box and photos were the only things that all 20 sites had on their home page. But maybe that's not so surprising given the difficulty in organizing something as complex as a university website.

Of course, all sites also had identity/branding that identified the university on the home page.

Content Analysis

In terms of actual content (as opposed to structural or navigational elements), there was less agreement among the 20 sites. Only two items - News and Feature/Spotlight occurred on more that 50% of the 20 home pages, and the majority of content types occurred on 10% or less of the sites.

ElementPercent of Sites
News85%
Feature/Spotlight55%
Events30%
Inside "University"15%
Directory10%
Announcements10%
Calendar5%
Visit5%
Recruitment5%


Page Element Placement

Another thing I was curious about was the placement of page elements on the page. I know that the issue of where to put the search box will inevitable arise, and I wanted to have hard data on what the "big boys" are doing.

Surprisingly, there were no real surprises. If you've read Neilsen, you realize that everybody is pretty much following the banner-on-the-top/navigation-on-the-left standard.

The following "heat maps" (OK, they're not heat maps in the traditional meaning) show where each of the most common page elements were placed on the page. To make these maps, I took a screen shot of each home page and then drew transparent rectangles over each page element. When I was done I removed the screenshots, leaving a stack of rectangles behind. Note that not every page was the same width, and I made the screenshots the size of the biggest page.

Top Banner
As expected, most sites use a top banner of varying heights, and most of them are placed - unbelievably enough - at the top of the page.


Identity/Branding
Here I'm only referring to the campus name and a logo or seal, if any. Some campuses put their logo in various places on the page, but almost all campuses put their name in the upper left part of the banner.


Search Box
Search boxes tend to be scattered around a bit more than the identity due to page layout considerations, but it's still clear that the most popular location is in the upper right-hand corner of the page.


Navigation
Instead of trying to break down the navigation into different types, I just highlighted any area that was clearly navigational in nature. Many home pages had multiple navigation areas. Again, no surprise as the left side of pages and the area directly below the banner were the most popular locations for navigation.

Photos
Photos are used to create interest and connection on a home page, humanizing the content by bringing people/and or the environment onto the page. Photos also add visual richness, whatever their content. Many sites use photos as part of features or spotlights on the home page, so there is considerable overlap in the placement of photos and the placement of features.

Again, not surprising, photos - with their attention-grabbing abilities - are most commonly prominently placed in the upper center of home pages. Many sites had photos in multiple areas of the home page, serving a variety of purposes.


News/Announcements
News and announcements (mostly labeled "News") were the most common content element on home pages. Though there was no overwhelming consensus on the placement of News, the most common location was near the center of the page, or on the center left, just to the right of the navigation.


Feature/Spotlight
Features or spotlights are either short articles or article teasers placed on the home page, mostly highlighting some interesting or newsworthy aspect of the campus. For example, Cornell spotlighted a talk given by Shimon Peres; UW spotlighted sports stories and student research in ANWR.

Placement of Features varied widely, but was most concentrated in the center of the page, and closely follows the placement of photos, since virtually all Features were accompanied by photos.


Events/Calendars
Events and/or calendars only appeared on about a third of home pages, but tended to all be placed lower center or lower right portion of the page.

Quick Links

Less than half of sites contained "Quick Links", typically as a drop-down list of links, but in a couple of cases as an actual list of links. The placement of Quick Links on the home page shows no discernible pattern.


The "Average" Home Page

On the "average" home page, 21% of the page area is taken up by photos, and 13% is taken up by navigation. Over a quarter of the page is taken up with white space or other content.

The following graphic shows the relative average size of each content area, in proportion to each other and the page.

The "Perfect" Home Page

Assuming that you wanted to build your home page based on the most common practices (which might or might not be a good idea), you would probably lay it out something like this:


Of course, this doesn't take into account the purpose of your home page, the primary intended audience(s) for your home page, your campus's particular branding, etc., etc.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Review of the Top 20 University Home Pages

Introduction to the analysis of the top 20 university home pages.

As part of the preparation for the redesign of the CSU, Chico home page, I decided to take a look at what other universities are doing on their home pages (following my personal mottos of "reinventing the wheel is for idiots" and "steal from those who actually know what they are doing").

Methodology

I conducted a simple Google search for "university" on November 27th, 2006, and took the first 20 sites that came up. I choose this approach because I didn't want to bias the results by selecting site that I personally liked, and because I felt that the top sites listed in Google would have a level of prestige and legitimacy that a truly random selection might not.

The top 20 sites were, in this order:
  1. Harvard
  2. Stanford
  3. University of Florida
  4. University of Michigan
  5. Yale
  6. Cornell
  7. University of Delaware
  8. University of Washington
  9. Duke
  10. University of Texas at Austin
  11. University of Virginia
  12. Georgetown University
  13. Columbia University
  14. UC Berkeley
  15. Princeton
  16. Indiana University
  17. University of Pennsylvania
  18. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  19. University of Wisconsin - Madison
  20. New York University

I eliminated all sites with table-based layouts as being too old and non-standards compliant for consideration. This eliminated eight universities (highlighted in red, above). I then proceeded down the list of results in the Google search until I found the next eight CSS-based university home pages. I ended up looking at 45 university sites before finding 20 that were CSS-based, meaning that less than half of the top listed universities in the country have CSS-based home page layouts. The final list appears as follows:

  1. Stanford University
  2. University of Florida
  3. University of Michigan
  4. Yale University
  5. Cornell University
  6. University of Washington
  7. Duke University
  8. University of Texas at Austin
  9. Princeton University
  10. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  11. University of Wisconsin - Madison
  12. New York University
  13. Ohio State University
  14. Boston University
  15. University of Colorado at Boulder
  16. Florida State University
  17. Brown University
  18. University of Arizona
  19. Utah State University
  20. Syracuse University
Basic Analysis

I took a look at the DocType for each site and ran the W3C HTML validator and the Cynthia Says accessibility validator against each page. I also wanted to see the minimum width of each page (the point where content would be hidden and scrollbars would appear). Here's what I found:

University DocType Validates Sec 508 Min Width
Stanford University XHTML 1.0 Strict Yes Passed 789
University of Florida XHTML 1.0 Transitional Yes Passed 770
University of Michigan XHTML 1.0 Strict Yes Passed 820
Yale University XHTML 1.0 Transitional No Failed 783
Cornell University XHTML 1.0 Transitional No Passed 809
University of Washington XHTML 1.0 Strict Yes Failed 942
Duke University XHTML 1.0 Transitional No Failed 718
University of Texas at Austin XHTML 1.0 Strict Yes Passed 775
Princeton University XHTML 1.0 Transitional Yes Failed 796
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign HTML 4.01 Transitional No Passed 770
University of Wisconsin - Madison XHTML 1.0 Strict Yes Passed 762
New York University XHTML 1.0 Strict No Failed 815
Ohio State University HTML 4.01 Strict No Passed 767
Boston University XHTML 1.0 Strict Yes Failed 795
University of Colorado at Boulder HTML 4.01 Transitional No Failed 765
Florida State University XHTML 1.1 Yes Passed 797
Brown University XHTML 1.0 Strict Yes Passed 765
University of Arizona XHTML 1.0 Transitional No Passed 858
Utah State University XHTML 1.0 Transitional Yes Passed 788
Syracuse University XHTML 1.0 Strict No Failed 721

DocType
The most common DocType was XHTML 1.0 Strict, with nearly half of all sites using this DocType. Next most common was XHTML 1.0 Transitional, with 35% of sites.

Validation
Of the 20 home pages tested, only 11 (55%) actually validated, regardless of the DocType. Seven of the nine XHTML 1.0 Strict site validated, indicating that the people who maintain these sites are paying attention.

Section 508 Compliance
Only 12 (60%) of sites passed Cynthia Says automated accessibility validation. The most common problem was lack of labels on input elements.

Minimum Page Width
Minimum page width measures the smallest window width a page can viewed at before content begins to be obscured and horizontal scrollbars appear.

The narrowest page was 718 pixels wide (Duke); the widest was University of Washington at 942 pixels. The average minimum page width was 790 pixels, and the majority were between 760 and 800 pixels.


Use of Flash

Six of the 20 sites (30%) used Macromedia Flash technology on their home page. The most common uses were to provide rotating photos with stories and links and to provide pop-up menus. However, Boston University uses Flash to create an interactive recruiting environment with stories, photos, interactive maps, and multimedia pieces including video.

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Most Popular Searches on the CSU, Chico Website

An analysis of the most commonly searched for terms on the CSU, Chico Web site, 2003 and 2006.

Part 4 in a series of analyses of the CSU, Chico home page and website that I conducted in 2003 and then repeated in 2006.

2003

Grouped and Ranked Search Terms

The following list groups similar search terms from the raw data. Terms such as "map", "campus map", and "map of campus" are grouped together to give a clearer picture of the true ranking of search terms.

Rank Term Total Percent
1 enter search term 3132 4.81%
2 campus map 1695 2.60%
3 portal 1534 2.36%
4 financial aid 1441 2.21%
5 as bookstore 1047 1.61%
6 jobs 1030 1.58%
7 transcripts 818 1.26%
8 webct 722 1.11%
9 athletics 610 0.94%
10 housing 574 0.88%
11 tracs 469 0.72%
12 student employment 447 0.69%
13 class schedule 424 0.65%
14 tuition 421 0.65%
15 email 373 0.57%
16 parking 356 0.55%
17 orion 354 0.54%
18 textlink 287 0.44%
19 human resources 239 0.37%
20 cave 235 0.36%
21 grades 209 0.32%
22 health center 181 0.28%
23 calendar 176 0.27%
24 wildcat card 169 0.26%
25 study abroad 167 0.26%
26 library 161 0.25%
27 nursing 156 0.24%
28 sororities 151 0.23%
29 cns 147 0.23%
30 career planning and placement center 138 0.21%
31 academic calendar 134 0.21%
32 celt 133 0.20%
33 records and registration 132 0.20%
34 associated students 118 0.18%
35 user services 116 0.18%
36 seo 113 0.17%
37 writing center 107 0.16%
38 sports 101 0.16%
39 as presents 94 0.14%
40 getting connected 89 0.14%
41 work study 87 0.13%
42 open classes 82 0.13%
43 geography 77 0.12%
44 address 76 0.12%
45 application 75 0.12%
46 open university 73 0.11%
47 scholarships 72 0.11%
48 regional and continuing education 70 0.11%
49 directions 68 0.10%
50 adventure outings 65 0.10%
51 student computing 65 0.10%
52 fraternities 62 0.10%
53 catalog 60 0.09%
54 syllabus 59 0.09%
55 clubs 57 0.09%
56 fall 2003 54 0.08%
57 whitney hall 54 0.08%

These statistics are very revealing.

First of all, they tell us that the link to the Portal is not seen by students, even though it is right next to the search box.

Further, they tell us that the lack of links to "financial aid" and "campus map" on the home page are a problem for many students. These would be prime additions to the home page in a redesign.

"Employment", "jobs", "human resources", etc., are also popular, indicating that links to jobs and employment might not be amiss on the home page. Many university sites do this, and a few even do it well.

Also, the fact that "enter search term" every other term says that consideration should be given to adding a single line of JavaScript code that would remove that text as soon as the user clicked in the search field.



2006
I repeated the analysis in 2006, the results of which are below.

Rank Search Term Total Percent
1 campus map 6530 2.24%
2 transcripts 5484 1.89%
3 financial aid 4701 1.62%
4 housing 4673 1.61%
5 jobs 4384 1.51%
6 academic calendar 3545 1.22%
7 webct 3246 1.12%
8 tuition 3144 1.08%
9 health center 3039 1.04%
10 final exam schedule 2881 0.99%
11 class schedule 2870 0.99%
12 career planning and placement center 2679 0.92%
13 calendar 2661 0.91%
14 athletics 2429 0.84%
15 as bookstore 2235 0.77%
16 study abroad 1994 0.69%
17 nursing 1992 0.68%
18 summer orientation 1956 0.67%
19 portal 1929 0.66%
20 orion 1802 0.62%
21 library 1681 0.58%
22 graduation 1668 0.57%
23 cave 1572 0.54%
24 records and registration 1529 0.53%
25 human resources 1508 0.52%
26 student employment 1486 0.51%
27 orientation 1398 0.48%
28 parking 1381 0.47%
29 as 1294 0.44%
30 catalog 1224 0.42%
31 general education 1109 0.38%
32 add/drop 1058 0.36%
33 eop 1029 0.35%
34 badm 101 1018 0.35%
35 admissions 970 0.33%
36 gpa calculator 952 0.33%
37 theme 877 0.30%
38 upward bound 839 0.29%
39 photos 755 0.26%
40 rec sports 743 0.26%
41 geography 722 0.25%
42 internship office 700 0.24%
43 logo 695 0.24%
44 peoplesoft 686 0.24%
45 bmu 645 0.22%
46 textlink 595 0.20%
47 intramural sports 591 0.20%
48 box office 547 0.19%
49 facilities management services 546 0.19%
50 psychology 531 0.18%
51 commencement 513 0.18%
52 research foundation 512 0.18%
53 scholarships 504 0.17%
54 university village 504 0.17%
55 sap 501 0.17%
56 regional and continuing education 497 0.17%
57 baseball 489 0.17%



Comparison


Obviously, there were several changes in relative search popularity from 2003 to 2006, but no clear pattern is apparent.

Despite adding a link to Campus Map on the home page, "campus map" (or similar terms) is still the most popular search term. I attribute this to the fact that the link on the home page was essentially added as an afterthought in the footer of the page where it is not very visible.

The drop in "email" from 15th to 95th can probably be attributed to the change in the prominance of the email links on the home page. Similarly, the drop of "grades" from 21st to 87th is probably due to the fact that grades are easily accessible via the portal now, and most students are aware of that fact.

The biggest success story of the 2003 redesign was in adding a single line of JavaScript to the search box so that when a user clicked in the box, the words "enter search term" disappeared, resulting in removing "enter search term" from the top 100 search terms altogether.

The second biggest success story was changing the name of the link to the portal from "Chico State Connection" to "Portal", which is what everyone was calling it anyway. That moved searches for the portal from 2nd most popular to 19th.

Some unexplainable changes include the drop of "student employment" from 12th to 26th, the rise of "career planning and placement center" from 30th to 12th, the rise of academic calendar from 31st to 6th, the rise of "catalog" from 53rd to 30th, and drops in "user services", "sports", "getting connected", "work study", "open university", and several others.

Rank 2003 Rank 2006 Term
1
enter search term
2 1 campus map
3 19 portal
4 3 financial aid
5 15 as bookstore
6 5 jobs
7 2 transcripts
8 7 webct
9 14 athletics
10 4 housing
11
tracs
12 26 student employment
13 11 class schedule
14 8 tuition
15 95 email
16 28 parking
17 20 orion
18 46 textlink
19 25 human resources
20 23 cave
21 87 grades
22 9 health center
23
calendar
24 68 wildcat card
25 16 study abroad
26 21 library
27 17 nursing
28 63 sororities
29
cns
30 12 career planning and placement center
31 6 academic calendar
32
celt
33 24 records and registration
34 29 associated students
35 65 user services
36 59 seo
37
writing center
38 58 sports
39 60 as presents
40 91 getting connected
41 80 work study
42
open classes
43 41 geography
44 84 address
45
application
46 93 open university
47 53 scholarships
48 56 regional and continuing education
49
directions
50 62 adventure outings
51
student computing
52
fraternities
53 30 catalog
54
syllabus
55 72 clubs
56
fall 2003
57
whitney hall



Summary


Overall, most terms that were popular in 2003 remained popular in 2006. Of the top ten terms in 2003, six were still in the top ten three years later.

Of the most popular search terms, virtually all of the top search terms appear to come from the current student audience group. Some terms (e.g., jobs, parking, financial aid, etc.) might also be used by other audience groups (community, staff, potential students, etc.), but it is impossible to separate those out accurately.

The table below gives a rough idea of the audience groups that would be most likely to use each search term. This is only my guesstimate, so you might have a different opinion.

RankSearch Term
Cur. Students
Pros. Students
Alumni
Faculty
Staff
Comm.
1campus map





2transcripts





3financial aid





4housing





5jobs





6academic calendar





7webct





8tuition





9health center





10final exam schedule





11class schedule





12career planning and placement center





13calendar





14athletics





15as bookstore





16study abroad





17nursing





18summer orientation





19portal





20orion





21library





22graduation





23cave





24records and registration





25human resources





26student employment





27orientation





28parking





29as





30catalog





31general education





32add/drop





33eop





34badm 101





35admissions





36gpa calculator





37theme





38upward bound





39photos





40rec sports





41geography





42internship office





43logo





44peoplesoft





45bmu





46textlink





47intramural sports





48box office





49facilities management services





50psychology





51commencement





52research foundation





53scholarships





54university village





55sap





56regional and continuing education





57baseball







Key
stu = current students
ps = potential students
alm = alumni
fac = faculty
stf = staff
com = off-campus community