How usable are university websites?
A report on a study of the prospective student experience

Dey Alexander, Usability Specialist, Information Technology Services, Building 3a, Monash University, 3800. Email: dey.alexander@its.monash.edu.au

Keywords

usability, user experience, usability testing, usability evaluation, university, higher education, prospective students, information architecture, navigation, findability, content, search, PDF, portable document format

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of prospective student experiences of university websites. Thirty-nine participants took part in a usability study which examined 15 university websites (13 Australian sites, one site in the United States and one in the United Kingdom). The participants--all prospective students--were asked to find a course they were interested in taking, the cost and entry requirements for the course, where the course was taught from and whether there were any scholarships they would be eligible to apply for.

Only 62 percent of tasks were completed successfully. Participants had the most difficulty trying to find information about tuition fees and scholarships. The study highlighted five key usability problems that contributed to these results: poor information architecture, poor content, poor search results and/or search interface, a reliance on domain knowledge about the higher education sector that many prospective students do not have and negative reactions to or difficulty using PDF documents.