Slides for the report on the workshop session on “Users Of Our Services” (session A2) at the IWMW 2001 event held at Queen's University Belfast on 25-27 June 2001. See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2001/sessions.html#a2

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; Student’s 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 R&D

4. Sample of results
“Find University’s 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• out of date material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?