Interviews with 6x current students in on Friday 17 July and Monday 20 July.
Key points
- When They can tell when something seems out-of-date, students can tell, and they lose trust in the site.
- Undergraduates only use F&S sites for staff information. They aren't looking at the homepages.
- Even the most engaged students are interested in big university news but not the day-to-day stuff. not interested the news F&Ss produce. They do like to hear big uni news though.
- Appearance of F&S pages in search results are very confusing for them.
- Can't understand why information is spread between a 'main' site and F&S sites. Wish it was all in one place.
Information needs
- Wish it was easier to get from Current Students to Course Finder. "Sometimes you have to pretend (online) that you don't go here to get information."
Coming to Victoria
Channels
- Comfortable with Blackboard (though it's ugly)
- They don't check any websites regularly. They only come to do tasks.
- They curate their email and Facebook, only seeing what they want to see.
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Faculties and
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schools
- They just want to find the right person to talk to. This is usually at the bottom of the page.
- Most had never looked at the F&S site homepages. They found internal pages via search.
Future planning - postgrad and jobs
News and events
- Like hearing about big news that lifts the university - nice to have something to brag about. Most follow VUW FB page for that.
- Interested in things like talks about research subjects, but get the details in lecturers, from posters - they don't go looking for it online.