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Education, Psych, Design, Law, Physics, Philosophy, Biomedical Science, Marketing, Music.
Acknowledge the lack of a voice from VBS.Engineering and Law.
Most have studied, or are studying, cross-faculty.
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Key points
- Victoria's website(s) weren't seen by the students as a place to go to for information, news or updates. They reported that they primarily use the site(s) for three specific tasks: find a person, get course info or access a shortcut to a tool.
- The students were unfamiliar with the 'Current students' section of the homesite, although although web stats indicate that enrolment-related information information related to dates, grades and timetables is accessed there.
- The students identified email and BlackBoard as their preferred channels for information from Victoria, with all students also following relevant pages on Facebook.
- Several students commented that they get too many emails: sign-up options should be more granular.
- The students didn't have a concept of F&S sites being separate ‘sites’ - although the one PG student involved did understand this.
- When looking for information about a staff member, students invariably used search and therefore missed the home page of a F&S site.
- Search results were sometimes swamped with results from F&S sites, which could be confusing.
- Three students noted that they didn't trust the web content because it might be inaccurate or out of date.
Course finder: students in both streams of testing said they need more detail about a course - a stronger description of what it is about. The lack of detail has a very high impact on them.
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- Students generally commented that they get too many emails. "Email bombardment." Sign-up options should be more granular. They want to get information about only what is of interest to them.
- All students use Facebook and get uni information that way. Two commented that they try to not be on Facebook a lot. "I don't want to be one of those people on their phones all the time." Students were often a little unsure about which Vic Facebook pages they follow. A number of them mentioned VUWSA, Vic in general, Overheard@Vic and pages distinct to their area of studycourses.
- Three students said they use the screens only for finding out the time.
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- Shortcuts in header menu (eg, MyVic, Library, BB)
- Finding information on courses
- Searching for lecturers staff to find their room number (also useful is the pic of them them (if it's up to date) - so they can tell who's who - and one student noted that the lecturer's research strengths are important when choosing a PG supervisor).
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One student said he uses 'Current students' to access key dates. (Commented that there were too many clicks to get there.)
Below: Analytics report, top pages in 'Current students', March 2015
Note that 'Current students' opens by default on Vic computers (eg, in Library) which may account for the high bounce rate.
View file name Current-students-march2015.docx height 250
Below: Analytics report, top pages in 'Current students', June 20152015
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- Profiles from past students: "I like to see where people have been taken and what happens to them after graduation".
- Overview of where you're heading and what skills you'll have at the end. (Careers and job info. Note tho that two students mentioned CareerHub, which they were familiar with and had used.)
- Information on postgrad requirements (for PG student).
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One very web-savvy student (year 2) said she hadn't been aware of separate F&S sites. (She recognised some F&S pages while looking at info related to planning her study, but had never realised they were their own sites with their own home page.)
Most had never looked at the F&S site homepages: they found staff profiles via search.
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We watched students use search: both in-site and google Google search.
- They had no problems with
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- Google, usually checking the first or first few results.
- For in-site searching, we saw them look for something general (eg. "postgrad") and something specific (XXX courses). When they made
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- general searches, they got lots of results from across the homesite (usually at the top) and
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- a number of Faculty and School sites. Usually they paused at the top result but then saw the F&S results below and felt they had to read them. This really slowed them down, especially when their faculty or school wasn't represented - they'd read the list more than once to be sure they weren't missing a 'more direct' result, before selecting the top answer.
One student who got a result with shaded 'recommended links' ignored those results. When asked what she thought those results might be, she couldn't say - but did ignore them (as you might ignore sponsored results on Google).