Survey results – summary

How important is it for you to reach each of these audiences with your web content?

Students, faculty, LIS staff = “very important”
Other staff = “quite important”
Alumni, other = “less” to “unimportant”
________________________________________________________________
How often do YOU use these LIS website features?

Often: catalog

Sometimes: helpdesk documentation, LIS staff directory, Newsletters, LIS blogs, LIS Wiki

Never: subject guides

Didn’t know existed: NONE! good.
_______________________________________________________________
What features of the LIS website work or could be improved?

Work: research guides

Need improvement: help documentation, website searching, LIS org structure, LIS depts staffing info, services/depts loctions, hours of service, space availability, who to contact for what

Unfamiliar: staff accomplishments, status of systems, LIS events calendar, tagging

3-way tie: emergency procedures
_________________________________________________________________
Do users often contact you for information that is available on the website?
yes = 65%  e.g. hours, documentation.
_________________________________________________________________
Is there information not on the LIS Website that would be useful to include?
yes = 58% (22 of 42 responses)- no theme of what’s missing is apparent.
Some comments on difficulty of finding what’s there already.
__________________________________________________________________
What is your level of comfort with the following technologies?
Most to least comfortable, overall –
Blogs, Wikis, IM, CMS, RSS, Surveying
___________________________________________________________________
What specific areas of the current site do you feel are successful? Why are they successful?
MIDCAT gets a few mentions. Documentation. Some comments apply to College website not LIS.
_________________________________________________________________
Is there anything else you’d like the LIS Website Team to know about?

22 responses – most common theme – need to improve access to info already there! “info is buried” “difficult to find things” etc.
____________________________________________________________________

Please rate your overall experience in navigating the LIS website.

Frustrating = 52%  OK = 48%  Love it = none.

Should be possible to show improvement on this metric.

5 thoughts on “Survey results – summary

  1. Ian McBride

    Awesome work with the analysis, Barbara. The most interesting thing I found here is that people are most comfortable using blogs, but not comfortable at all using RSS. This seems really strange, since the power of blogging is really in syndication through RSS. I wonder if this means that people are navigating to these blogs as normal web pages, rather than consuming them via RSS. (I think it does).

    I would take this to support the creation of a central blog for LIS for these reasons:

    1. People appear comfortable with blogging, so content creation, tagging, categorization, commenting are all things people can handle, though obviously we can improve knowledge and support.

    2. People aren’t subscribing to blogs via RSS, so they have to visit the blog to see updates. This is a lot easier if there’s just one blog to visit.

    3. Maybe the reason that people aren’t subscribing is that there’s just too many feeds to which they need to subscribe. Again, a central solution presents an easier interface for this.

    Or am I analyzing this incorrectly?

    Reply
  2. Barbara Merz

    Before we assume that people are all that comfortable with blogs, here’s the data in detail:

    Not at all comfortable = 4
    Less comfortable = 13
    Moderately = 19
    Comfortable = 6
    Very comfortable = 17

    It’s just that they’re less comfortable with the other technologies! Comfort could just be in terms of reading the LIS Blog, for example. To see the full gory details, check the private survey results posting.

    Reply
  3. Elin Waagen

    Thank you for all your great work on gathering and analyzing the survey data, Barbara.

    Blogs are intuitive to use and navigate once a few basics are learned. RSS – once discovered – can help users organize and access the info contained in blogs.
    Incorporating some training recommendations in our proposal could help increase the comfort level with using these communication tools.
    I use blogs daily – and I am grappling a little with how we can organize all our work across many departments – and communicate with our users – through the use of a single LIS blog. I could use a lesson in how pages work – and how we can better utilize categories and other blog features to facilitate communication through the use of a single platform. One of the comments I frequently hear is the frustration with where to go for what on which platform.
    I currently organize most of my information on an igoogle page with google reader – it is still a lot of info to process – but I’d be lost at this point without having one site where I keep and access my info.

    Reply
  4. James Beauchemin

    I will echo others in saying great job on thisBarbara/all. Am I correct in assuming we had 42 individuals respond? It might be helpful to know what the counts were per Fac/Staff/Other for participation so that we can understand this data better. Location, position at the college, and perspective will be very important factors when reviewing this information.

    The biggest thing I came out for me in this information was this question:

    Is there anything else you’d like the LIS Website Team to know about?

    22 responses – most common theme – need to improve access to info already there! “info is buried” “difficult to find things” etc.

    I guess this is no surprise, but this is a biggy to consider during the design phase. The other interesting thing from this information as that people were not using the tools available to make their experiences better on the web. I can relate because I currently do not use the RSS feed or other tools available for blogs and wikis.

    I think education or better yet educating our community to know about these tools and use them should be a priority. Many of these type of tools we are talking about are already present; so maybe we figure-out how to correct this issue and add new tools as well to improve the experience of our end users?

    Reply

Leave a Reply to James Beauchemin Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *