ICS Staff Information Needs for the ICS Website Questionnaire Compilation

ICS Staff Information Needs for the ICS Website

ICS 205 Group #5

Tom Herring

Chris Jensen

Maulik Oza

Douglas Grimes

Abstract

In this report we present the results from our survey to study the information needs of ICS staff members with respect to the ICS website. We conducted semi-structured interviews with four key staff members and collected questionnaires from twelve others. This paper presents the results of our study and offers recommendations for designing the site based on the results obtained.

1.Introduction

We started the study with a simple concern – what information does the staff need? Based on this question we started digging further and many issues and concerns arose. This study specifically tries to address some concerns like – Can the information needs of the staff be satisfied by the redesign of the ICS website? Does the staff want to provide any information for the website? What kind of information does the staff generally look for on the website? We decided to gather information in two ways: semi-structured interviews with staff members who are major website information providers and consumers, and questionnaires for other staff members.

The next section addresses data collection methods. Subsequent sections provide an overview of the results, detailed results, and recommendations based on the results.

2.Data Collection Methods

We started by grouping the staff into categories based on the job function. This led us to ask which staff members were likely to be high consumers and providers of information for the ICS website. We identified the following groups of staff members based on their job functions:

Student Affairs Office

The Student Affairs Office provides services to current and prospective graduate and undergraduate students with respect to academic advising and program planning. Staff members are either counselors or coordinators:

• Counselors

• Graduate: They are responsible for assisting graduate students with respect to their academic and administrative needs.
• Undergraduate: They are responsible for counseling undergraduate students in a variety of activities including academic advising, degree checks, certification, change of major policies etc.
• Peer Advisors: They also perform similar duties as that of undergraduate counselors, but are more restricted in their responsibilities.

• Coordinators

These people are responsible for administrative tasks such as scheduling, managing staff etc.

• Instructional Support: They are responsible for course scheduling -- classroom and lab reservations, evaluations etc.
• Director of Students Affairs: This person is responsible for managing the Student Affairs Office, as well as other administrative duties, such as dealing with some special student cases.

Office of the Chair

The office of the chair is responsible for all the chair’s business. Duties also include reservations for conference rooms, handling faculty and staff intranet passwords, providing departmental guidelines etc.

Business Office

The business office is in charge of business matters, including travel reimbursements and setting purchasing procedures.

Computing Support

This is one of the main providers of information. This group is responsible for maintaining accounts, labs, and machines on the ICS net.

Distribution Center

The distribution center is where all assignments, exams, handouts are provided by faculty and student employees. They are responsible for updating information about the availability of assignments and exams in the center.

Facilities Management

They are responsible for maintaining the office keys, office space, mailboxes etc. They need to post information about the various policies etc.

Data Gathering Methods

We wanted to filter out groups based on the mentioned job-function by deciding which groups were the important consumers and providers of information. Given the limited time available, we decided on two simple techniques of data collection:

• Semi structured interviews
• Questionnaires

We limited the questionnaire to one page to encourage a high response rate. We also used the questionnaire as a central part of interviews to ensure a common core of questions were answered by all our subjects.

We avoided asking for comparisons of the old and the new versions of the website, but found that many of our subjects compared them anyway. The names of the users are not disclosed due to privacy concerns.

3.Summary of Results

ICS staff are generally less than satisfied with the current website. The strongest discontent is with the organization of the website, however there is also a widespread desire to update the website content. Many subjects expressed a preference for the previous website because it was easier to find needed information. Many suggestions were proposed, including ICS maps, FAQ’s, a search facility, and general reorganization more like the previous website.

4.Responses from Interviews

Student Affairs

Here we present the results of our interviews with two counselors and an administrator.

Counselors

The primary concern of the two counselors we interviewed was easy access to the information a student needs, including course schedules, degree requirements, and other policy matters. The counselors were also concerned with relevance of the information, rather than misinformation on the website. The most important content needs were information on policies such as change of major, courses for a specialization, and graduation requirements.

When asked about posting potentially sensitive information both of the counselors we interviewed agreed that some information should be made secure, i.e. accessible to authorized people. This might include giving professors access to a student’s entire record apart from course grades which is prohibited by university law, but restricting others’ access to name and email. One of the counselors also suggested that the website should not include frames, as prospective students from abroad often have slow connections and older browsers.

One counselor also wanted information to be organized for prospective students based on their backgrounds. One suggestion was to have separate links for transfer students, international students etc. The section on prospective students should also include credentials of the students admitted in the last academic year so that it gives them a better idea of where they stand.

As mentioned, the counselors were most concerned about the organization of the web site. One of the counselors pointed out that one of the link from the current Student Affairs Office page connects different information from that mentioned in the link. The new site looks and feels better than the old one, but is not as easy to navigate. One the counselors even told us that she did not use the new website; she always used the old one because she could not find what she needed on the new one. An effective website is important to the academic counselors because it reduces the number of questions that counselors have to answer. Obviously, students and prospective students would also benefit from any website redesign that answer their questions more efficiently.

Administrative Staff

The administrative staff in Student Affairs is concerned with both management and counseling. They field many questions that could easily be answered by a website. For example:

• Research interests of faculty
• Current research projects
• Contact information for projects
• Concerns about the student life
• Scholarship information

This page could be in the form of a FAQ.

When asked about the requirements as regards the current students, he was more concerned about ICS policies being available on the website, especially frequently requested policies, including degree requirements and change of major.

He was also concerned about misinformation on the website, especially from dynamic links. Students have been misinformed by errors in the current system. He also mentioned the lack of link integrity in the current website --clicking on a link that should take you to the page for academics takes you instead to the page for administration.

When asked about his vision for a revised website, he suggested:

• The home page should have more links (broader, shallower menu structure).
• Information about student life and faculty life, perhaps as FAQ’s
• The website should be searchable, with both basic and advanced search capabilities.

He also proposed hiring a person to take care of the information content of the website and update it on a regular basis. Such a position might include other duties as well. Apparently, he did not know that Computing Support currently has two employees responsible for the ICS website – one for content, and one for hardware and network issues. Both of them have other responsibilities which appear to take priority, and appear to be limited in their authority to implement changes in website content and organization.

Computing Support

The Computer Lab and Computing Support are technically separate, but effectively function as one. As information producers, they have their own web site, which keeps information such as lab hours, locations, and software/hardware configurations (which is of interest to some faculty and students). Most of their questions they receive concern technical support. Often, when they make changes to the network configuration or supported software and hardware, they send out email notifying the ICS community of the changes. Occasionally they put the information on the web site. Email is their most frequent mode of communication, but the website is still very important to their function.

The most frequent questions people have concern why their accounts aren't working and how to activate an account. Answers to why an account isn't working are usually answered on a per-case basis, so responses require information beyond what the student may know on his or her own and which must be discovered manually by lab or support staff. The nature of this information thus makes it difficult to translate into some sort of FAQ or expert system which could be placed on the web. Account activation instructions are already available on the website.

Computing Support also receives many questions about printing and using ICS computers, both in the lab and remotely. Some of this information is currently available on the web, but it might be reorganized for easier access.

The computing staff was also concerned with having the maps of ICS on the website, both for their use in computer maintenance, and for students and others visiting the department. One staff member mentioned that the old website had good zoom able maps and that were easy to use, but the current website only has a PDF map with no zoom feature

Business Office

The business office demonstrated unanimous desire to revise the website; all four members of this office promptly completed their questionnaires. The main website need they expressed was up-to-date contact information for communication with students, professors, and administrators. They would also like a simpler website organization, and would like to have information related to purchasing policies and travel reimbursements forms on the web so that it is easier for people to access the information.

5.User Suggestions

This section consolidates the findings in four sections:

New Information

• The website should provide information on ICS policies, including most of the information that is available in the form of fliers in the ICS Student affairs office.
• FAQ’s – separate ones for different categories of users, such as prospective students, current students, faculty, prospective faculty, staff, sponsors, industry etc.
• Information about the student and faculty life on campus
• Major announcements or news on the front page (like the engineering website)
• Search facility – both basic as well as advanced search UI’s.
• Information about scholarships – this should be periodically updated and should include deadlines and eligibility criteria.
• Zoomable maps to ICS buildings, as well as the university and surrounding areas
• Links to course websites and prerequisites – this information could be made more useful by having a student log into his/her account and be able to see if s/he is eligible for a particular course. This information should also be available to faculty members wanting to check if a particular student has met the prerequisites for a certain course. Privacy concerns should be taken care of based on the university guidelines
• A corporate page with job offering from companies wishing to recruit ICS graduates, information for prospective employers, and information for companies interested in ICS research.

Revised and Corrected Information

• Degree requirements for the different ICS majors, including requirements for the previous 8 years. The information about the various specializations offered in ICS should also be listed. This information should also be updated whenever a policy change is affected.
• Contact information about students, faculty and staff. Much of the information on the current page is either missing or incorrect. If there are privacy issues, then the information should be restricted to authorized users.
• Links to outdated information should be fixed. All information that requires dynamic information retrieval should be checked for relevance.
• The profiles for the most recent undergraduate and graduate classes should be updated annually, including average GRE and SAT scores and GPA’s of the admitted students, to serve as a reference for prospective students.

Other Requests

• Make the web pages compatible with older browsers. This means eliminating frames and other features that require new browsers.
• Emulate the successful websites of other departments at UCI and elsewhere, including the UCI Engineering Department (
• The intranet for the staff and faculty should be easily accessible, as in the old website.
• Have a dedicated staff for updating information and maintaining the website, with clear procedures to obtain approval for requested changes (more on this later)

Website Organization

• Make the information on the website more intuitive and easy to follow. People get lost in the current hierarchy of links and menus.
• Provide quick links to frequently accessed items and related sites of interest, such as life in Irvine.

6.Graphs

In this section we present graphs to illustrate the level of satisfaction of the staff with the ICS website. The first graph shows respondents’ satisfaction with website content; the second graph reflects their satisfaction with website

Thus from the above charts it is very clear that more than half of the people surveyed were not satisfied with the current website, especially the organization of the site.

7.Discussion and Recommendations

We found that our website users have lost faith in the site because so much of it is difficult to access, seriously out of date, or otherwise incorrect. Such skepticism and distrust discourages website usage and undermines its utility. If such attitudes are shared by other user groups, then the whole department will bear the consequences: reduced efficiency and diminished ability to attract top students, faculty, and corporate affiliates.

For student affairs staff, much of the information they provide is policy related, or specific to a particular student. For those policy related issues, some information is available on the web and some is not. Though much of the information requested is available, one staff member noted that irrespective of what may be found online or in fliers available in the student affairs office, many students will not accept the information unless they hear it from the mouth of an official representative. The infrequent maintenance of the web only reinforces this behavior, as it gives the perception that much of the information is out of date and, therefore, the policy listed no longer applies.

Many inquiries relate to when courses will be offered, and planning a long-term schedule for completing graduation requirements in a timely fashion. The Registrar’s Searchable Schedule of Classes includes current and past course offerings, though its existence may not be readily known without some in-depth browsing. One counselor suggested software whereby a student could enter courses already completed and desired specializations, and have a web application propose a schedule for the following quarter in conjunction the schedule of classes for that quarter.

Among the business offices and computing support staff, the most frequent web site inadequacies cited regarded location and contact information. Specifically, they were interested in email and phone numbers of ICS personnel and maps of the ICS sector of the campus. We’ll address these requests one at a time.

Availability of contact information is somewhat different from many other information access issues presented. Upon entering the university, graduate students are given the option to disclose or withhold such identifying information in an effort to ensure their privacy. Thus, if a student decides to withhold his email address, it will not appear in the ICS directory. Many graduate students’ contact info is available on the UCI directory, but not in the ICS website. Currently, unlike the university directory, there is no set policy for changing one’s access permissions in the ICS listing.

Although students, staff, and faculty can update their personal entries in the university’s directory (provided they can find the right link), there is no such facility for updating contact info on the ICS website. The ICS contact pages are coded in HTML, and unlike the university site, are not connected to a database. The ideal is to have database-driven contact pages, with link on each contact page for updating personal info. Until that can be implemented a much simpler interim solution would be to provide a link to the university’s searchable directory of persons, and perhaps a complete list of department contacts on a page with access restricted to ICS faculty and staff.