Google Analysis Report of New Grady College Website

Usability Report
The primary focus of this usability report is whether the new website of Grady College is attractive, user friendly and easy to navigate on mobile devices. Therefore, this report will introduce the descriptive data first and then analyze the users’ behavior in these aspects.  I was assigned to focus on prospective students and graduate students, and I will propose suggestions for improving sites for prospective graduate students in the last part of this report. Because the new site was launched in February, this report based on the data from February 8, 2017 to April 9, 2017. 1. This report also analyzed previous version of Grady website. It is fair to analyze old version website in two months, from December 2 to February 2, because the new version was analyzed in two months as well.
 
Descriptive data

1. The majority of our users are female aged from 18 to 24 (Female: Male= 65.68%: 43.32%; 18-24 age=40.76%). Most of the users visit Grady website through desktop (73.03%), and the rest of them use mobile phones (23.99%) and tablets (2.98%).
2. The number of pageview varies depending on the days of the week. It increases from Monday to Wednesday and then decreases from Thursday to Sunday. Usually, the number of pageview will reach the peak during the weekdays and then reach the bottom on weekends. It indicates that users are mainly students and faculty in Grady college. It also explains why most of the users visit Grady websites on desktops.
3. Both the new users and returned users make up around 50% of users in Grady website (New users: returned users= 49.5%: 50.5%). Most of the users come from the United States (92.88%), and rest of them come from China (1.11%), India (0.65%), United Kingdom (0.47%) and etc. It is possible that these users from other countries are applicants who are interested in Grady College’s programs. Thus, users of Grady websites are consisted of current students, staff and prospective students.
4. Users mainly come from the following sources: Organic (54.4%), Direct (26.16%), Referral (12.34%), Social (7.21%) and Email (0.24%). It indicates that most of the users access the Grady website through the result of search engine and directly type the website of Grady college. Users who visit Grady websites through social media are mainly from Facebook (82.06%) and Twitter (11.87%) users. However, the bounce rates are high, which suggests that people may just click it by mistakes or do not intent to deeply explore on websites.

Attractiveness in engaging users

1. On average time, people spend 3 minutes on Grady home page, which is much higher than average time they spend on other pages. I think it is because the home page has more content to read. The total word numbers on the homepage is 809; this takes fast readers about 1 minute to read, while average readers may take 4 minutes. Because of the 3-minutes average time, I acknowledge the attractiveness of the homepage.
2. The homepage is ranked as the top landing page, which indicates that this page is very important. It is also the top exit page, and 39.18% of viewers exit on this page, which is higher than the average. I think it is because of the bounce rate, which is 45.72%. With the high bounce rate and large total number of pageview, the exit rate of homepage is relatively high.

Easy navigation

1. People visit the following pages after they visit the homepage of Grady website: academics (25.35%); faculty (13.38%); about-grady (8.22%); apply (8.22%); search (5.15%); events (3.98%); grady-students (3.04%); news (2.91%); about-grady/contact (2.54%); alumni (2.33%). Among the following top 10 pages, five of them are in Hamburger icon, and two of them are sections on the home page (events and about-grady). The elements on the homepage are interesting, but the engagement with users on homepage is not good enough. Top 10 following pages after homepage in previous period did not include “search” page, while new website indeed contains it. It indicates that new Grady website need to improve its navigation.
2. Compared with previous version of Grady website, the following page of homepage are “department” (20.05%), “graduate_studies” (11.91%), “students” (11.44%), “about” (7.41%), “major” (5.11%), etc. The categories of following pages implied that visitors usually have interested in learn more about Grady’s majors and its graduate studies. It indicates that the branch of navigation bar in new websites can contain “Department: ADPR, Entertainment and Media Studies, Journalism”, “Graduate studies” etc.
3. 5.15% of users have visited the search site, which indicates that the navigation of website needs improvement. Because the Google analysis view sets the search term with high frequency, I use the next pages of the search page to analyze what users are looking for. The key words of search terms are scholarship, faculty, academics, forms, tuitions, and contact. It suggests that the branches of navigation bar can contain “scholarship”, “program forms”, “tuitions” and “contact us” etc.
4. The homepage of Grady website takes longer time to load than the average. The average time to load the homepage is 21.71% higher than the average, while the average time to load M.A degree page under the academics is 352.75% higher than the average. The Google analysis provides suggestions to optimize images, enable compression and remove render-blocking JavaScript and CSS content, etc.

Mobile navigation

1. The average time that mobile users spend on homepage is 1 minute, which is shorter than average time on all pages. It indicates that mobile users usually have very clear targets when they visit the homepage. Therefore, the design of the mobile homepage need to let users easily find the navigation bar and have less content to read. 
2. The data show that the load time of faculty page on mobile is 142.40% higher than the average. The faculty page contains lots of pictures and has hundreds of staff’s portfolios. It is hard for users to find the professor’s email or phone number. I suggest the top search icon add another frame to let users search “name” directly.

13.Suggestions:

• Desktop version-- make the hamburger icon more obvious; change the layout of navigation; have branches under big sections: about, prospective students, current students, alumni, research; Under the categories of prospective students and current students, we can have smaller branches as: Undergraduate students, Master, PhD, etc; List a line of navigation above the hamburger icon and highlight the topics of the following pages; double check the JavaScript code on the websites and improve the load speed of the websites.
• Mobile version----set a navigation bar on the top of the page; make the hamburger icon more clear and obvious; add search “name” on the top of faculty page

 
Prospective students

1. Among users who click through other websites to access Grady websites, almost half of them come from the home page of UGA. The rest of the referral users come from introduction of degree and major pages in graduate school websites. We can reasonable infer that prospective students who want to apply to programs in Grady take these paths: UGA<admission/academics<apply.
2. In order to help incoming students to find application page easily, here are two suggestions: Add navigation bar on the top of the homepage and then highlight “admission” or “apply”; When people click “learn more” about Grady on the homepage, which will take them to the “about-page” of Grady, here we can add a side bar or a bottom section to notify new users to apply.