Online survey results
A huge thank you to all those people who completed our website survey launched in May 2008. We have now collated our findings and have received some really interesting results. It’s always enlightening to find out people’s views on the JISC website. The goal of this particular user research is to identify the key tasks and information needs of 3 different sections of the JISC audience. Our largest response was from Librarians (64 survey responses) and e-Learning specialists (29 survey responses) and so I will cover the findings from these communities here.
Our online survey covered:
- Perceptions of JISC
- Content preferences
- How users keep up-to-date
- Key tasks
- Perceptions of the JISC website
- Demographics
- Web2.0 awareness
More than 90% of Librarians and e-Learning specialists considered it at least fairly important to keep-up-to-date with the latest JISC developments. Mailing lists and email updates were the preferred method. People also rely a lot on word of mouth.
The major strengths of the site were seen as:
Reliable content / clean design / ease of use
The major weaknesses of the site were:
Too much content / hard to find information
Subject keywords
Survey respondents identified 10 keywords that described their particular areas of interest and from this we’ve generated a tag cloud for each audience.
e-Learning keywords
There seems to be a reasonable degree of overlap between the language and labels used by e-Learning specialists and Librarians.
Which pages are most important?
For e-Learning specialists, funding opportunities and publications were particularly important, along with high-level pages relating to specific JISC themes or programmes.
For Librarians, funding opportunities and publications were again important, as was news. There was also more of a focus on specific JISC Services.
The results from the survey revealed that there is a lot of overlap between the information needs of Librarians and e-Learning specialists – for example, the most popular self-described tag for both groups was ‘e-Learning’.
Next steps
The findings, from our online survey and expert focus groups held in February, have led our brilliant usability experts from Pure Usability to 3 potential solutions. We are now in the process of conducting a third round of testing, which involves some prototypes. We are hoping to do a lot of this testing remotely using Skype and desktop-sharing. If you’re interested in taking part, you can register your interest.
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