# User Experience, Functionality and Aesthetics Evaluation in an Academic Multi-Site Web Ecosystem
## 6 Discussion
An academic institution encompasses a series of cultural characteristics that can be expressed through aesthetic features on the Web [51], and the ecosystem's common design core allows for the permeation of these distinct parts of the institution's character throughout the sum of its websites. From an ergonomics standpoint, common features and website structure mirror the attributes of locality and cultural similarity that are prevalent in the real-life relationship of offices belonging to the same institution. This backbone inherently influences the visitor UX of all the websites of the ecosystem, thus empowering the overall Web presence of the institution. Moreover, the use of common features allows visitors to retain their familiarity with the layout when transitioning from one institutional website to another. This feeling of comfort and familiarity has been noted to lead to lower user disorientation and confusion, thus increasing both perceived and actual usability [52]. It was explicitly noted by the experts that the common positioning of functional elements or familiar interactivity had a positive effect on their engagement. Familiarity is an achievement of the human factors approach of the system's design, which transfers the interrelationship of the various offices of the institution from reality to the Web [52; 53] and as such has a positive effect on usability and the overall visitor UX [54]. Moving beyond the common base of the ecosystem's features, individuality and adaptability were also highly valued by the participants. The variety of scientific fields that are covered by the institution's departments was large enough to warrant serious differentiation both in terms of aesthetics and functionality. Participants were vocal about their ability to influence the aesthetic result of their websites. This is something to be expected since aesthetic elements are closely related not only to the appeal of a website [55] but also to the values it is trying to convey [49]. As mentioned in the focus-group interview, aesthetic variation is also the result of the requirements posed by the pre-existing real-life entities that dictate the creation of a website. RQ3: How Do Website Interconnectivity and Collaborative Content Management Affect the Generation and Dissemination of Academic Web Content? Interconnectivity is one of the major strengths of the Publish@Ionio ecosystem since it not only facilitates the dissemination of informational content far and wide throughout the ecosystem but also allows changes in this content to be propagated instantly. One of the most important factors of website evaluation is ensuring the relevance, accuracy, and timeliness of information [56], and the ecosystem's content organization and dissemination practices play a great role in achieving these goals. The collaborative features received a lot of praise from the interviewed experts, especially with regard to saving time and ease of use. This pivotal importance of the \"requests\" feature is signified even more by the chart presented in Figure 7. With the introduction of this feature, the increased footprint of news item reposts on different websites displayed radical growth. This increased content presence may lead to SEO benefits, which are closely related to the content's quantity and textual richness [57]. Table 4 and Figure 8 present the high percentage of involvement of both individuals and websites with the collaborative request system, as well as the system's continuous rapid growth, as measured quantitatively through the requests' data entity. Through both qualitative and quantitative means, the collaborative process was deemed to be useful and efficient, but ultimately, it also serves as a motivation for a website to go through the process of migrating and integrating with the multi-site Web ecosystem. In terms of content generation that is not related to news dissemination, Table 5 provides some interesting insights.