UPDATE: Here is latest on our project to create a new framework for students to experience student services. My partner and I created this concept brief that details the problems and as well as a proposed solution. For the explanation of the project click here.
Challenge Summary
There
are many disconnects in place between Student Services at Utah State University
and the Student Body. Students are confused about what a service actually has
to offer, or have no idea that the service is even available. The student
services are limited on what physical interaction they can provide. Websites
are text-heavy and at times, difficult to understand, information is wide
spread and hard to track down. This project aims to fix many of current issues
and design a better and more engaging online experience for students. There is
definitely room for improvement.
Students
want information that is easily accessible; they want help with their daily
issues. They also want to be connected into a campus community. We hope to
create a portal that will point students to exactly what they are searching for,
through individualized design profiles and tacit delivery of information.
Students deserve to have a positive experience when associating with the
various organizations on campus. Currently, students seem to be having more
negative or neutral experiences, rather than positive experiences regarding
student services.
Throughout
this concept brief, we hope to explain the current issues involving student
services and illustrate our suggestion to remedy the situation. This will be
done through what might be called “The Aggie Genome Project”: a student driven
initiative that will make the online experience a student personal and
beneficial to the student. It consists of various features that would
help improve the experiences of students at USU while addressing the need of
students. This project aims to provide a new experience that will be engaging
and a tool that students will actually want to use. This project was designed
specifically with students in mind.
Current State of Student Services
Students who feel connected to their school
are more likely to stay in school and be successful. It is the aim of all
student services to increase this connection. Students need help with things
such as financial aid, math tutoring, resume editing, and advising, just to
name a few. However, most students aren’t even aware of what is available. For
example, in the research done last spring, it was determined that only 1 in 9
students even knew about the Career Services Office. If the student did know
about Career Services, most often they had some misconception about what it had
to offer. This seems to be true of all the services to different degrees. While
all of the services would love to be able to serve more students; hours,
staffing, and funding limit the capacity of the services for providing help to
students. When help “in person” is not
available, students often turn to emails and the school website. Emails are
often found to be problematic, as they may be misinterpreted, or viewed as
impersonal. The website is also problematic for reasons that will be explained
below.
Utah State
University’s website is overly complex and cumbersome, to the point that that students and sometimes even staff and faculty
avoid it. To navigate many of the necessary portions of the website (Banner,
Aggiemail, Touchnet, etc.) the student will need to enter their password info
multiple times. Many of the pages are text-heavy and require time to dissect in
order to find the information needed. Students are busy and need to find information
quickly and efficiently, and if it can’t be found fast, they will go without. Furthermore, each service has a personality
or image that they are trying to portray to the students. Whether it be “open
and inviting”, or “efficient and painless”, each service wants the students to
know what kind of atmosphere they can expect when they come in to use the
service. This is difficult or impossible for many services to portray thru
their current web page. For example, the Access and Diversity Center wants to
portray an image of being open, inviting, fun, and being “for everybody”.
However, every service is bound to a formatted style of web design, which in
the case of the ADC, does not allow them to create a website that is warm and
friendly.
Many of the websites, for example the
Financial Aid website, contain a lot of technical writing. Unless a student is
a financial expert, they are unlikely to understand it. This may create the
impression that the Financial Aid office itself will be confusing. While it is
necessary for the site to contain all of that information (required by law in
the case of the Financial Aid office), it intimidates and impedes students who
are looking to use the site’s information.
Navigating the USU
website can be difficult as some information is not clearly classified into
appropriate categories. Especially problematic are the names of many of the
services; names seem to frequently deceive the students as to what service is
offering. For example, the Access and Diversity center has nothing to do with
Access(Banner), yet one of the more frequent misconceptions they face is that
their office handles Banner.
The search engine
on USU’s main page is inefficient. When the search engine is used, it can yield
irrelevant and outdated results. It is seemingly consistent with returning an
article from the 80’s, which just happens to contain the word you were
searching for. Students are quickly discouraged and leave without finding the
answers needed.
Another
disconnection to mention is the intended usage of the sites. Many of the
services noted that their information on the website was geared towards serving
other entities, such as other Univesities looking for information, not towards
the student. While this is necessary, it does not benefit the student.
Physical
location is also an issue when it comes to “in person” interaction. Most of the
student offices are on the third floor of the TSC; an area most students avoid.
In the student’s mind, that floor is seen as a place that “elite” students go.
Lower classmen are typically afraid to venture up to the third floor. That is
where the student government offices are located in addition to the majority of
student services. The average student feels like they don’t belong there
because they are not part of ASUSU or directly involved with any of the
organizations located there. This
provides a point of disconnect between the student services and the student
because the student does not feel comfortable going to those offices. While
there is little that our current project will be able to do about physical
location, we aim to make the virtual web location of these services much more
appealing.
The Audience
By
taking advantage of all that USU has to offer, students will begin to make
connections with the school while forming life-long skills. This is why it is
imperative that the relationship between students and the school is enhanced.
There
are two very clear stakeholders in that will be affected by our proposed
improvements. The first is the students. This is a student centered approach. Consider
a market for goods and services, where the student is the consumer, while the
school is the supplier. The student is looking for what value they can gain
from the university, and the university is looking to see what value it can
provide. The more value provided to the students, the higher the satisfaction
rate will be. With this is mind, the student is the primary stakeholder looking
to benefit from our project.
This
is not to say however that the needs of the Student Services are not important.
Each Student Service has a business objectives that must be met, and each is
looking for ways to more efficiently provide their service. The aim of our
project is not to damage student services in any way, rather we want to find
ways to benefit the student and the service simultaneously.
The Concept Strategy
We propose a new
experience framework for student services be created in order to serve student
needs more fully. The website needs to be geared more toward “this is how our
service can help you”, and less toward “here is what we offer”. The way we
would do this would be through what you might call a “small store model”. In a
small specialty store, you will find merchandise on display in the showroom,
well lit with all the information you might want to know when you are thinking
about buying. Behind the showroom however, is a storage room with much more
variety in colors and options.
Our design idea would follow this pattern.
There would be a “showroom” of sorts, which shows you all the vital information
you need about each service “for sale”. Each service has the opportunity to
make itself known, and clear up common misconceptions. The student can then
choose to look at what a service has to offer in greater detail, and if
desired, search in the “backroom” through all the information that is
available.
There are several
benefits of this system. Students need
to know what is available to them. They need to have this information easily
accessible. With this type of delivery, students will be able to clearly see
what each service offers them, and how it can help them, in a tacit manner that
leaves little confusion. They will then be able to easily make the choice of
which service to look into deeper, based on the need they had when beginning
their “shopping trip”.
This would not
merely be a page full of links however. The idea is to make this whole website
more personal to the student. The portal will be incorporated with CANVAS,
Banner, and all of the other common usage sites. Students would then only need
log in once, and be able to access everything they need in one place. Students
would be able to customize the page to their needs, so that each time they log
in, their interests are most heavily represented on the page.
Preliminary Feature List
Each student would
have a personalized profile that would include information such as their major,
class level, current GPA and class schedule that the student would have control
over which details would be made public. Any school official, however, would
have access to the information. Advisors and professors would be able to update
and make notes on a student’s profile. This profile would be similar to those
found on Facebook but would be filled with more academic information such as
majors, minors, clubs, focus of study, etc. A profile would make the student
more familiar to any facultly who might be working with the student, and give
the student more incentive to take ownership of the site.
Also
similar to Facebook, the site would include a live feed page. This feed page
would be directed more at relaying information about upcoming events. Student
Services staff could post to it about upcoming fairs, service projects, and
other events. A student’s teacher could post about upcoming events related to
the class, SI Sessions, etc. Students could create posts about study sessions,
requests for help, etc. and then make their posts visible to other students in
their class.
This
type of profile would include an “appointment scheduling tool”, where advisors
or other faculty could request a meeting with the student, and vice versa. The
students basic schedule would be automatically uploaded into the tool, and the
faculty in question would also have a basic schedule uploaded. This would allow
easy comparison of available times, and allow them to immediately fill in a
time for an appointment.
An advisor would
be able to put alerts on the students account if needed. These alerts would
prompt them to make an appointment through the appointment scheduling tool.
These alerts would spawn from many issues such as being in danger of failing a
class, needing to make a tuition payment, or failing to register classes. Until
the student meets with the appropriate person to have the alert taken off,
their account would be limited. Certain special features would be restricted,
such as viewing other profiles and registering for classes.
There would also
be an updated search engine. The current search engine on the USU main website
often yields irrelevant and out-dated results. A tactic that Google search engine uses is to
place “official sites” and “sponsored
sites” at the top of the search list. Applying this to a USU search engine
would mean that the search list would place student services and events closer
to the top than older, less relevant information. A search engine is critical
because students don’t always know exactly where to go for their information
needs.
On
the main page there would be an integrated calendar. This calendar would show all the events on campus in addition to
all school deadlines. This would put all event information in one central and
easily accessible place. This would be a little more solid than the “feed page”
mentioned above, and include information such as time, place and any admission
costs. You would be able to take events from the feed page, and pin them into
the calendar, thus making it more customized to the your needs. Students would
be able to pick which events they went to and which ones they liked. This way,
future events that apply directly to the student’s
interests would be suggested on the main page. This is similar to the Pandora
Radio website, or the Music Genome Project. The idea being that continued user input
continues to match the website more and more to the user.
Another
key feature about the site would be tutorials. Currently, many of the services
have things they wish the students knew, or had done, before they come to use the service. Accordingly, there would be
“What to do BEFORE you come” tutorials available on the site for each service.
Knowing what needs to be done prior to appointments will save the service time and
maximize the value a student receives from their experience with the
service. There would also be many other
tutorials based on what the Service needs the student to know. For example, the
Financial Aid office could have a tutorial about the general process of
applying for FAFSA, or many other things.
In
some cases, a student’s peers are the best resources. They are the experts on
campus life and would be able to answer certain questions better than a school
official. USU has not had any previous place for students to go to ask
questions of other students. In this new design, however, there would be heavy
emphasis on the discussion boards. Students would be able to go there to pose a
question to the entire student body, or have the option to narrow it down to a
specific class or those with the same major. Questions and comments would need
to be moderated in some way either by advisors or professors. Any student would
be able to flag a comment or question as potentially offensive or irrelevant
which would then be looked at by a moderator. In theory, this would eliminate
any casual conversations or offensive language.
There
would be an option for students to integrate their Genome account with their
Facebook account. That would allow Facebook access to their account and pull
information to put on the newsfeed.
Students would see updates such as events and updates to discussions
they are participating in right on their Facebook newsfeed. This would not work
the other way however, the Aggie Genome page would continue to contain only
information about school related events.
Conclusion
There
are many obvious disconnects to be found between the student and the
University. It has been stated that students with increased connection to the
university, tend to do better during their education, as well as in their
career after graduation. By incorporating this new design into the daily
functions of the university, USU will be able to better serve the students, and
thus increase their connection. Because this is a student driven initiative, it
will reflect the needs of the student more clearly, and make the areas of weak
connection stronger.
This is a model
that would have to be adopted by all school officials, faculty, staff and
advisors in order for it to work and achieve its maximum benefits. Seeing as it
is a motion by the students to benefit the students, it should be a priority
for faculty and staff to transition to the new program. We urge you to make the
needed changes to benefit the student.
