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 57 responses to this experiment.
| Position | % of participants rank it in the top ten | |
| 1 = | Find a staff member’s details (phone number, email, position) | 65% |
| 1 = | Find out who works in a school/directorate and what their roles are, including their organizational hierarchy | 65% |
| 2 | Access apps (email, Box, My Dundee, etc.) | 63% |
| 3 | Find and read policies in a simple, easy-to-use format | 46% |
| 4 = | Book a room online | 44% |
| 4 = | View and book my annual leave | 44% |
| 5 | Browse and book OPD courses | 40% |
| 6 | Report a problem to IT | 39% |
| 7 | Find out easily which rooms are free | 33% |
| 8 | Find a location on the campus map with directions on how to get there | 30% |
| 9 | View the university calendar, showing committees, working groups, etc | 28% |
| 10 = | Find out where someone’s office is located on the campus map | 25% |
| 10 = | Report a problem to Estates | 25% |
One thing that perhaps isn’t communicated clearly by the above, but has come across very strongly in workshops and in raw user stories, is that overwhelmingly staff just want « a place » to find information about people and policies, and he doesn’t care who gives it to him.
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 42 responses to this task.
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.
If you are not on our subscriber list and would like to participate in the study, please let us know at help4u@dundee.ac.uk.
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.
