Improving the student experience of a university web site

Keywords

web support, quality, effectiveness, usability, audit, web management, university, knowledge sharing, community of practice, communication, change management.

Abstract

This paper reports on a project undertaken to improve University of Tasmania (UTAS) web site resources for potential students, focusing on domestic undergraduate science students. The project focused on web site evaluation, task-based usability testing and a student survey. The project aimed to improve the suitability of Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) sites as recruitment tools. To achieve this, the project focused on improving information retrieval, site management, and separating public or 'www' content from internal resources. Traditional marketing programs to recruit students have limited impact on web site usability because they do not address the needs of students, which in this study were revealed to be utilitarian. Usability testing confirmed that the usability of the UTAS web presence for prospective domestic undergraduate students was 'average', as defined by Alexander (2005) [HREF3] for the tasks tested in that study. However, moderate changes to search, navigation and the application of a client-focused content model can produce increases in task success of 20.7-26.6% in tasks equivalent to Alexander (2005). Such successes will, however, be short-lived if they are not advocated or managed centrally and if not supported by effective site structure and management and authoring standards enforced at a University-wide level.