This year we used Matomo to gather some statistics about the websites. This is now very useful information to guide our decisions on how to structure the website for next year. Let's have a look at some numbers:
Main Hubs
Currently, we organise the website in hubs, which is directly reflected on the menu hierarchy. This works well for us, HQ, since that's how we organise Committees and working groups. But what is the behaviour of our target audience? What are they looking for?
Page views
Total number of page views in 2021, grouped by hub.
You can click on a label, e.g., Main_Page, to hide it from the graph.
Comments:
Not surprisingly, the competition hub is the most popular one: 2021.igem.org is, indeed, the competition website.
There is an understandable variance in terms of page views accros differents hubs. Leaving aside the discussion of what should be on the website or not (I do not want to enter this danger zone), it's clear that some content deserve an easier path to be reached.
Competition Hub
Let's now have a close look at the Competition hub. Again, you can click on the /Competition label to hide it from the graph.
Page views
Competition hub total number of page views in 2021, grouped by second-level organisation.
Comments:
Deliverable pages represent more than half of the page views within the Competition hub (excluding /Competition landing page). They have 72,120 page views, much more than all the pages views of any other hub (e.g., Judging hub has alltogether 68,644 page views).
The menu style imposes several clicks to hit the final content. We can see this in the number here above: the landging page, /Competition, has 13,715 page views; but it's content, as a standard landing page, is basically redirections to other pages where the content is.
Judging Hub
Similar to the Competition Hub, what we call Judging pages attract a lot of attention from our audience.
Page views
Number of page views in 2021 for pages in the Judging Hub.
Comments:
These mainly reflect the work carried out by both JPC and JCC, which we all here understand pretty well. But, for a team member, why aren't Medals and Awards under the Competition Hub?
Again, the /Judging landing page has a pretty high number of page views. We basically imposed at least 10,074 clicks throught the year for people looking for something on the website.
Team Hub
The Teams hub concentrates information about the community, how to reach to other teams, communication with iGEM and Grants opportunities.
Page views
Number of page views in 2021 for pages in the Team Hub.
Comments:
I would take the liberty to question the relevance of a page such as iGEM Global Slack where we only state the rules of usage of Slack. Traci, Abi and Dorothy (please forgive me if I forgot someone) did an excelent job organising this rules on Slack, so I would suggest that we don't need such page. Also, we can have a a canonical place in the footer of the website with all social media, a common practice.
Safety Hub
This hub grow a lot this year. We have several pages with a lot of content. A relevant metric that indicates the relevance of them is the Average time on page that users stayed. You can see it in the Individual Pages section below. The top one mostly come from this Hub.
Page views
Number of page views in 2021 for pages in the Safety Hub.
Comments:
We see again the same pattern: the pages with most of views are a strong requirement and the hub landing page.
Individual Pages
Feel free to have a look at the raw data from individual pages. If you are interested in much more metrics, let me know, I can give you a Matomo account.
Proposal
Based on the data here above, on the comments and some ideas, let's try to see what we could improve next year.
Principles
Main focus is on how teams find information, which might not necessarily be how we, HQ, organise ourselves.
Competition website is about... the competition (prioritise this content)
Most accessed pages should be prioritised (higher level)
Build content around deliverables: calendar, requirements, resources would be under them
Single FAQ page, questions would be organised by theme (easier to ctrl+f)
Ideas
Imagine all the resources about the wiki deliverable (specially now, moving to Gitlab) are available inside the deliverables/wiki page? It would probably have some new sub-pages written from scratch, for instance, /deliverables/wiki/how-to-start. By clearly organising it in the top-level, the sub-pages would be very easy to be reached.
There are several pages with events, webinars, workshops, meetups, etc. It was a common comment teams made (from the Survey) that it was hard to know what was going on. We plan to have a single page with all the events and calendar, with very easy filters and exporting tools.
For non deliverable-related content, we can try to organise the content by "phase" in the competition: All "static" information about Teams, all the paperwork, requirements, payments, etc could be in a dedicated section. A single Calendar section would give teams a clear way to find what is going on.
Community section can group all the communication intra-team, collaboration opportunities, team initiatives, etc.
The Home page would probalby evolve througout the year. The idea would be to develop some custom widgets to help Abi to highlight different types of content there.
The menu needs to change. I won't expose my bad design creativity, but I would strongly suggest a clean, simple and less-click-needs implementation such as the one from GitLab. Please have a look!
New Menu Hierarchy
I believe a decent new organisation could look like:
Registration
Register a Team + Team Requirements + Team Fee + Handbook
Create an Account
Join a Team
Grants
Rules of Conduct
Two-Phase Projects
Responsible Conduct
Calendar
Deadlines
Events + All Workshops + All Webinars
Giant Jamboree (can move higher later in the year)
Opening Weekend
Deliverables
...
wiki (deadline, requirements, resources, etc)
...
Community
Navigating iGEM + tips for team + start a team + funding