I covered the background of this research in my post on what prospective students want from our websites.
The results!
Top ten tasks
We received 831 responses to this experiment.
| Position | % of participants rank it in the top ten | |
| 1 = | Check my University email | 67% |
| 1 = | Sign in to My Dundee | 67% |
| 2 | Login to eVision | 54% |
| 3 | Consult the list of module/course deadlines for the whole year | 52% |
| 4 = | Find out when and where the lessons are | 45% |
| 4 = | Look for something in the library | 45% |
| 5 | Get a list of exam times and locations | 44% |
| 6 | Look at the modules of a course and how they are taught and assessed | 39% |
| 7 | Find out the grades I need to pass a module | 33% |
| 8 | See what’s on the reading list for a specific course | 32% |
| 9 | Find out about career opportunities after graduation | 28% |
| 10 = | Log in to a conference recording | 25% |
| 10 = | Find out more details about a course | 25% |
| 10 = | Find a staff member’s email address | 25% |
Current students are a more difficult audience to provide a comprehensive solution to many of the tasks they have highlighted span multiple different systems and directions. The main corporate website will be able to provide some of these solutions, but perhaps not all. What interests me the most from the research we’ve done is that students don’t understand who is responsible for what information, they just want to be able to « do stuff, » and they don’t really care who provides that information.
Similarity matrix
It seems really confusing at first, but it’s a very effective way to visualize information. It essentially shows how often two tasks are grouped together. The redder the box, the more it has been grouped together. For us designers, it helps us determine what people in similar places will be looking for, so we can implement designs that satisfy that desire.
We had 424 responses to this assignment.
What’s next?
The study is not fully completed yet because we want to give as many people who want to respond, the opportunity to do so. However we are already starting to analyze what is coming and design some first concepts.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be posting a few posts looking at these first concepts for parts of the site, based on this feedback, so you can see how we use data to give people what they want.
