2002 University Website Congruence Study: How 70 Universities Measure Up

Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
Director, User Services and Network Applications
joe@oregon.uoregon.edu

It is commonly accepted and expected that most corporate websites will have a tightly controlled "look and feel." That is, all or most of the pages in a typical corporate website tend to conform to a single standard, using the same color scheme, font families, and graphical elements.

But what about university websites? Traditionally, university websites have been noteworthy for their lack of regimentation and for the diversity of styles resulting from decentralized page creation processes. But is this still true? We decided to take a systematic look...

The Home Page as Institutional Web Standard [back to top]

For this study, we assumed that if a university's web pages had a standard look, that look would be most evident in its home page.

We recognize that in some cases, a university home page may incorporate features (such as periodically changing news items) that can't readily fit into a departmental website's design. However, most university home pages do exhibit common characteristics (e.g, font families, university colors, or institutional logo), which could easily be incorporated into departmental website designs.

But do academic and administrative department web pages actually incorporate those sort of elements? Is there an effort by departments to conform to a consistent institutional identity?

Eight Common Departments at Each of Seventy Universities [back to top]

To check, we selected 70 major American universities. We looked at each school's home page and compared it to the primary web page ("departmental home page") for eight diverse institutional units. The eight units chosen for analysis were intentionally selected to maximize the likelihood that if diverse page designs were present (or if pages congruent with the university's home page design were present), we'd be able to see them. The eight departments we scrutinized were:

• The English Department - chosen as a proxy for discursive departments that might be expected to have "text heavy" page designs. English also typically represents an important mainline "Arts and Sciences" department, customarily a core academic department, with both a significant number of majors as well as service course delivery responsibilities.
  
• The Art Department - chosen as an exemplar of design-oriented departments. At many schools, web-related courses are often offered by the department--a factor which might be reflected in its web page design.
  
• The Physics Department - chosen as a typical example of numerical/analytically inclined departments (and one that might be stereotyped as being "pro-technology").
  
• The Library - selected to represent university departments with material for both on- and off-campus audiences, and a department that needs to integrate a variety of local and distributed information resources. Libraries also typically have strongly held opinions about how to best organize and deliver information to their constituencies.
  
• Student Affairs - chosen to represent a typical core administrative department present at most schools. (Cornell and Harvard didn't have traditional offices of Student Affairs)
  
• Student Housing (or Residence Life) - chosen as an example of a typically self-funded administrative department. Student Housing also taps a different dimension of institutional life in that it deals with students outside the classroom.
• University Athletics - college sport sites represent a highly popular visitor destination, and official university athletic sites are also of unique interest because they are often outsourced to professional web designers. Did outsourcing help or hurt overall consistency with the university's institutional motif?
• University Alumni Office - we believe most Alumni Offices make a concerted effort to assert their institutional affiliation by employing the university's color scheme, mascot, motifs, and so on. We also believed the Alumni Office provided another excellent example of an "outward facing" (rather than internally oriented) web page.
  

Collecting the Data and Scoring the Pages [back to top]

Each of those pages was visited using Netscape 4.78 on a PC running Windows 2000. We printed the pages to an HP color laser printer for scoring, and also saved screenshots of the pages captured using HyperSnap for web reference purposes.

We then scored each of the eight pages relative to each university's home page, giving each of the eight departmental pages a score ranging from 0 to 3:

• 0 = Design completely independent or unrelated to home page; an essentially incongruous design (which may incorporate a common logo, but in an inconsistent location).
  
• 1 = Minor or incidental resemblance to home page design; may include a common logo or other minor unifying element (used in a consistent fashion) in an otherwise not incongruous design.
  
• 2 = Strong (but incomplete) resemblance to home page; incorporates some common major design elements in a not otherwise incongruous design.
  
• 3 = Cookie-cutter clone of home page; same or strongly similar layout with same color scheme, same font, same graphic elements--likely executed by the same designer or design team as the home page.
  

Each page was viewed by two scoring judges. Consensus between the judges was usually quite strong; when there was a difference of opinion with respect to assigned scores, discussion was used to eventually reach a consensus score. (Since we provide screen captures of the pages as they were viewed, you can easily rescore the pages yourself, if you desire to do so; see Figure 1 below.)

Figure 1. Congruence scores for the websites of 70 academic institutions.

Interpreting the Results [back to top]

If all eight pages examined for a given site were closely modeled on that university's home page, the score for that institution would have been 24 (8 departments times 3 points per department). On the other hand, if all eight sample pages appeared to be independently designed and were effectively unrelated to the design of the university's home page, the score for the institution would be 0 (8 departments at 0 points per department).

Our data revealed that no school studied showed perfect design congruence (i.e., a score of 24), but ten percent of the schools examined did have scores of 11 or higher, with the University of Alaska's site having the highest overall level of congruence (with the still really quite modest score of 13).

Ten percent of the schools examined had scores of 0, indicating a high level of departmental design independence across all observed departments.
The mean total congruence score was 3.87 out of 24, with a standard deviation of 3.28. The median (50th percentile) value was 3, and the modal (most common) total congruence score was 2. The UO earned a quite typical total congruence score of 3.

Departmental Patterns [back to top]

Some might wonder if particular departmental home pages were shown to be congruent with the institutional home page more often than others. Here are the patterns we found:

Departmental Congruence Score Distribution for All 70 Institutions

Looking at each of those departments, and reporting just the number of departments that had a congruence score of zero, we see the results shown in Figure 2 at the end of this article.

Thus, even in the case of administrative units such as Student Affairs and Housing, fully half the institutions in each case did not exhibit even superficial congruence between departmental home pages and the institutional home page. Clearly there is a high degree of website design autonomy across all the institutional units examined.

Conclusion [back to top]

Based on the departments examined at the 70 sites studied, it is clear that universities tend to retain a significant degree of website design independence, allowing us to reject the notion that most university websites have "gone corporate." University websites continue to exhibit a refreshing degree of design autonomy and creativity, reflecting the diverse problem solving and communicative approaches commonly associated with academia.

Figure 2. Number of departments scoring zero congruence, by department.

Scores and Screen Captures [back to top]

To see the web pages referenced in this study, go to "Scores and Screen Captures" at the bottom of http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~joe/university-websites/

To facilitate page comparisons, separate windows will open when you display individual pages.