Notes

Thanks to the people who participated to our focus group and to the test performed in the usability lab, we have had the chance to identify some of the issues we have also encountered as student central users since we started and also some others.

We recorded our testers while they were performing the tasks we gave them. From what we have recorded, we calculated the average, maximum and minimum time of completing them. We realised that looking for timetables, lecturer contact details and opening and closing time of the library was causing some issues from the difference between the average and the minimum time taken from our users to perform that. Task 3 and 4 instead showed that the average time taken to perform them was close to the minimum; this means the testers didn’t find them too difficult.

The functionality and page content brought up a number of questions and possible amendments during analysis and user testing. One point that came up to our attention relating to both these areas was the idea of making sure that content available on StudentCentral needed to be consistent with each other to provide some sort of familiarity to the user. It continued to come up in multiple instances of testing, and many of the issues relating to StudentCentral to the content could be amended by making sure they were all concurrent with each other.
As regards to the page content, we found that there are 3 different points of it that could be improved to give the user a much better experience.
In the main My school page, all the important links are on the left side of the screen and the central part is occupied by the announcements, that most of our testers have said to be not that considered from them and that the main content of this area should be more engaging.
Finding the date for a particular exam is not that straightforward, because all of them are held onto a big document and the user has to go through a big amount of data to look for it. A search functionality would solve this problem; students would search by exam code or name and that would make their life much easier.
The complaints area is full of information, which might confuse the user and the current complaint process is printing a format on paper to be sent, once filled in. A solution could be a digital form to fill in and submit from the actual website.

We have highlighted the issues and given our personal recommendations, which, if applied, would help many students to use the website facilities with a more pleasant experience.

All the data we collected helped us writing this report, which we aim could be taken in consideration from the head of the course, whose objective must be guaranteeing current and future students from University of Brighton at least the greatest performance of its website.