Notes from Suits You Sir

1
Notes from Suits You Sir

• Catering for users of our services

2
Warm up - who are our customers?
Potential students Current students
Post-Doc/research International students
Visitors Students families Professional
organisations Businesses Academic staff
Admin staff Support staff Primary secondary
schools Local community External academics
Web-folk Marketing Potential employers
.. With Differing Individual Needs - Language
IT skills Disabilities Knowledge of HE And
Technologies Browsers Connection speed
Hardware Plugins WAP etc. ...
3
The Exercise

• Examine 10 University sites adopting the persona
  of a possible
• customer - try and find some basic relevant
  information.
• Tourist
• Disabled potential student
• Potential international student
• Potential postgrad student
• Commercial exploitation of RD

4
Sample of results
Find Universitys Disability Statement On 7
sites where this could be counted, the average
was 6 clicks from the home page - ranging from
2 to over 12
5
Observations

• still fundamental HTML errors (eg. No ALT tags)
• broken links, missing pages
• out of date material
• poor quality of Uni search engines
• essentially hierarchical
• too much Uni speak

6
Observations

• targetted FAQs
• use of drop down menus
• provision of a concise PDF guide
• tailored of content (?)

7
Recommendations

• Research required into site usage - turn hit
  counts into useful data
• Web based usability testing service (Webwatch?)
• Best practice documents - testing scenarios
  (UCISA?)
• Workshop with marketing/PR people (UCISA/UKOLN?)
• Finally, do we WANT all the traffic we get?