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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- Three students noted that they didn't trust the web content because it might be inaccurate or out of date.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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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.
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Below: Analytics report, top pages in 'Current students', June 20152015
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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).