Reflecting on Pat’s thoughts with regards to the new portal I can’t help but think back to how I perceived the portal design and content decision making process.
Let me give you a hint: 1) in a vacuum and 2) by committee.
We cannot assume people will want our information, even if we know they need our information.
There’s a lot of valuable information in the portal. Most of which probably goes unnoticed by the average user who we think uses the portal for mainly the following:
- Web CT
- Registrations & Grades
Those parts of the portal fit Calvin Mooers’ 2nd law.
In an environment in which it is absolutely critical for a customer to have information, an Information Retrieval system, no matter how poorly designed, will tend to be used.
This isn’t to suggest that the portal is poorly designed but rather that students use it because they don’t have a whole lot of options.
I would suggest that an unfortunate amount of information displayed in the portal, aside from the big 3 mentioned above, falls into Mooers’ 1st law.
In an environment in which it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information in hand than for him not to have it, an Information Retrieval system will tend not to be used.
Examples of information falling into the 1st law include:
- Official E-mail Communication Notice
- Administrative Announcements (telling me how to navigate the site, which should be obvious)
- WebCT Status Announcements (static content)
As a student, would I care that E-mail is an official communication method of the university? Do I really want the portal to tell me that records and registration links are under the Records and Registration tab? Do I really need to see every-time I login that WebCT will be down during hours that I’m asleep? This is a bit tricky because for these pieces of information the answer is Yes and No. Yes, I find it valuable and useful to get this information once but after that it’s more painful to have to navigate around it to get to what I need. So the obvious question is why not present users with away to make this information go away after it’s been consumed?
The rest of the information in the portal falls under Mooers’ 3rd law:
In an environment in which the trouble of having information versus that of not having it are fairly evenly balanced, system design and performance tend to be the deciding factors in whether or not an Information Retrieval system will be used.
This is exemplified by portal content such as:
- Campus Life
- Student Announcements
- Bookmarks
- My Stuff Page
The Upshot
If the university wants the portal to succeed in providing information to students beyond what is critical to their academic endeavors, then an effort must be made to empower the users of the system to influence the decisions that effect what available in the portal.
It could be something as simple as enabling users to customize their portal pages by removing any content, except for the big 3, or it could be as thorough as conducting focus groups to find out what students want readily accessible in the portal, or it could even be as calculated as analyzing usage patterns in the portal and on the main campus server to determine the most important question in information retrieval, what do people want know?
Calvin Mooers reminds us that design of a useful information system requires a deep understanding of users and their social content. We cannot assume people will want our information, even if we know they need our information. Behind most failed web sites, intranets, and interactive products lie misguided models of users and their information-seeking behavior. Users are complex. Users are social. And so is information. — Peter Morville