Sustainability Values: Interactive Website for Values Diagnostic Reporting and AnalysisCS 4624: Multimedia, Hypertext, and Information Access

Instructor: Dr. Edward Fox Client: Dr. Bruce Hull

Group: Leah Triplett, Will Miksovic, Andy Paulonis, Mary Haninger, and Kaleb Jubar

Sustainability Values Diagnostic: an Interactive Website for Values Diagnostic Reporting and Analysis is a project for CS 4624 with Dr. Fox. The goal of this project is to develop a website that supports a survey created by our client, Dr. Hull. This website must allow users to take Dr. Hull’s survey, analyze their answers, and provide them with feedback about where they fit in relation to their sustainability values. After giving the user their results, all the data needs to be compiled in such a way that Dr. Hull can download and analyze it for his own research. All of the data accumulated will be kept anonymous to maintain the user’s privacy. This data will allow Dr. Hull to see where his students’ and colleagues’ values lie and how to tackle these sustainability issues in the future.

This diagnostic examines values, myths, and biases embedded and hidden in most sustainability efforts. It is designed to help sustainability professionals and students learn about their own preferences, values, and opinions as well as how they compare to others around them. This will in turn help them understand themselves, become better listeners, build productive collaborative efforts, and manage conflict.

This project was started by a CS 4624 group in 2018 (Brizuela, X., Stewart, C., Mistry, H., & Eltepu, S.). This group’s effort is being used as the base for our current project. It was originally hosted on WordPress and had an integrated Qualtrics survey.

We began the project by migrating away from WordPress and Qualtrics because a lot of the initial issues we discovered revolved around this system. We moved to a platform called PythonAnywhere, which allows full control of the website by programming in Python through the Flask framework. We also created our own in-house survey so that data collection, aggregation, and analysis was simpler. The survey is powered by client-side JavaScript validation and server-side Python validation, with a connection to a MySQL database and JSON metadata files. The final iteration of the website also includes automatic user report generation and an admin portal for sustainability professionals to download the full set of survey data.

We separated our user tests into an administrator user test and student user tests. We did this because of the different interactions that our client will have with the site versus other users. Our client user test involved logging in as an administrator and performing administrative tasks. Our student user test involved more common interactions with the site. This separation allowed us to evaluate the functionality of our site on different levels. Each of our user tests followed the same process. We asked our users to complete a task and describe their thought process aloud. In addition, we asked them to answer quick information analysis and heuristic questions. This allowed us to understand the usability of our website, as well as the general aesthetics. Once we completed each set of our user tests, we evaluated the most common comments we received and adjusted our site accordingly.

Our website allows the user to take a survey and receive an instant report based on their responses. They can also download/print their results or re-access their results at a later date with a provided access code. In addition, the user can take the survey with a set group and see how they compare. Lastly, an administrator can login and download the complete set of data for further analysis.

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Home Page: Survey: Results: Previous Semester:

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