By gdhp on

Hello,

We are a small research team from the Ohio State University who regularly conduct media studies that involve tracking people’s use of various websites.

This particular call for interested developers is for this specific project, however we build these website on a reasonably regular basis, and therefore there is potential for future jobs for successful developers.
All websites must be able to do the following:

  • Have a simple to use UI for the researchers that allows them to set up articles, headlines etc.
  • Be able to cope with randomization processes (e.g. showing certain articles in randomized or specific orders to participants).
  • Be able to record user behavior to accurate levels (the standard measure used in most of our experiments is recording the time a user is on a particular article to the nearest second).
  • Be able to cope with URL parsing where embedded data is taken from the URL and stored by the website, as well as being able to put new embedded data in an outgoing URL.

Other general pointers

  • These websites are very purpose specific – they are used only for the experiment. While they need to look lifelike, they do not need any common website functionality beyond what is requested.
  • The developer will also be in charge of hosting the website. The website must respond quickly, however, expected traffic is very low, usually only a maximum of 20 users at a time.

I have attached here the guide we have created for this specific project.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15201213/Online%20vs%20Offline%20SE%...

Even if developers are not used on this specific project, but we would be very interested in talking to developers who would be interested in this kind of work going forward too. So even if you are not interested in a quote, please feel free to email me with a general interest.

Please do email me if you are interested or have any specific questions. My email address is pearson.325@osu.edu.

Thank you,
George Pearson
PhD Student, Ohio State University

PS I should specify that I do not require this project be built on Drupal and it may be that Drupal is not the best platform, but since I used to build websites with Drupal myself, and I really like it (and the community of people who build off it) I thought I would post here too.