Farhad Davudov
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT WEBPAGE: ANALYSIS AND REPORT
Date: Wed, 11 Feb. 2015
To: Ms. Thompson, Ms. Brown, and Mr. Woodrow, members of the Computer Science Design
Committee
From: Farhad Davudov
Subject: Computer Science website’s review
Greetings to the members Computer Science department!
Thank you for this opportunity to share my opinion about CS website. The report attached includes my
impressions, my experience with working on website, and some points that can be improved. Overall, the
website is pretty decent, though, it could use some touches in design and navigation. I hope that these
changes will be included to the next iteration of the webpage.
Thank you and have a great day!
Farhad Davudov
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Farhad Davudov
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT WEBPAGE: ANALYSIS AND REPORT
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT WEBPAGE: ANALYSIS AND REPORT
Below is the report to the members of Computer Science Design Committee about Computer
Science webpage’s impressions and user experience. It is based on shared opinions of students in
COMP3040 class. While overall styling and organization of information is nice, it could be
improved by changes in style and content.
First impressions
At first glance, the webpage looks nice and informative. It matches the style of University of
Manitoba color scheme, but not completely. It has usable tabs with categories. Navigation is
fairly simple and intuitive .News section is useful, containing important news about university
life. However, there are some points that needs revising and reworking.
Possible improvements
Improvements could be done in several areas:
I.
Style: While overall it is good, some fresh touches in visual style would be nice, such as
modernizing the fonts, changing visuals of active elements on webpage (buttons, search
bar, etc.). Adding drop-down menus to the main categories would greatly improve both
style and navigation.
II.
Navigation: The search itself is not very useful, since it does not provide needed
information often. There is also a lot of confusion with the co-op section. It does not lead
to the actual co-op website. It would be better to put a separate link to it instead, as with
Jump or D2L websites. Again, drop-down menus would simplify and improve
navigation.
III.
Content:

Women in Computer Science: Would be nice to have a section containing
important information for women, including information about leading women in
CS, share of experience, and so on
 Jobs: This section is very important to students. However, jobs are not updated
often, which makes this section not so helpful.
 People: There should be more information about professors, including courses
and their offices. It would be nice to link prof’s offices to google mas, so it would
be easier to find them.
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Farhad Davudov
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IV.
COMPUTER SCIENCE DEPARTMENT WEBPAGE: ANALYSIS AND REPORT
Courses information: There is little to no information about Computer Science
courses on the website. There should be more information about schedule, classes,
professors, etc. The great thing to do would be to put all information and content
from www.courses.cs.umanitoba.ca to the main website, especially since latters’
design is very outdated.
Social integration: Would be awesome to see more information from different
social networks and better integration of social functions.
News: They are updated rarely and lack content. Adding news not from university
and department, but from the whole Computer Science industry would greatly
improve value of this section.
Mobile Version: Since mobile devices are very popular nowadays, the mobile-friendly
version of website would really help students in their usage of this website.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the CS website is decent, having nice visual style, a lot of useful information and
can be helpful in many situations. However, I believe, that several improvements can make it
even better. Several key points to look at:
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The website needs some modern touches in its style and redesign of navigation elements.
Navigation can be improved drastically by polishing the search engine, adding dropdown menus and better organization of menus.
A lot of content could be added and/or updated more often, such as news, jobs, people,
etc.
It should have mobile version, since many students access websites from their mobile
devices.
Overall, this website is useful and helpful in many situations for CS students. While I do not
personally use this site too much, I think, that with the improvements above implemented, me
and many other people will find it more helpful.
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