Consumer (dis) orientation: University websites

I remember enrolling in university classes during my undergrad studies, pre-internet, and every semester being exasperated and enraged by how a fairly simple set of information – available classes or units and their schedules, and the processes involved in enrolling in them – was made to be unfathomably complex.

Shift forward to the internet age. Websites endow us with tremendous power to present information, making large volumes of data become accessible and easy to navigate. Multi-layered menus, tiered lists and links can quickly reduce an insurmountable, craggy mountain of data to a grassy little mole-hill of useful information.

A university website serves a range of communications functions, internal and external, and web technology enables us to provide multiple communications services from a single starting-point with simple navigation that directs each type of user to the information that she or he requires.

Since websites became the primary means of communication for universities another shift has occurred: University education has become a far more competitive, businesslike and profit-driven venture. This might imply an imperative for a much greater orientation toward the needs and wants of the end-user, the student; wanting to attract more students and students of the highest caliber, universities will make use of the web to present their programs, faculties and alumni in ways that readily represent the options and advantages that are offered to students.

Or – not.

Visiting universities’ websites to collect pertinent information in order to plan an education is a horribly tedious task.

Customer orientation is about giving people what they want or need. While thinking about this issue I’ve visited 60 universities’ websites seeking a specific set of information that is a typical goal of a prospective student, which I’ll explain below. In doing so I’ve received a lot of messages that I did not seek, commonly including very general content praising the grand histories, reputations and goals of various universities. Getting what I wanted ranged from (at best) an acceptable browsing experience to (quite commonly) an impossibly demanding chore.

Let’s take an example of one type of visitor to a university website: a prospective graduate-level student. The information that is relevant to this person is quite easy to outline. I’ll do that in the context of a hypothetical web navigation structure.

Audience  –  Identify your interest as a member of staff, alumni, media, current students, prospective students, researchers, parents, etc.

Study Level  –  Select undergrad, graduate, post-doctoral or another level of studies

Discipline  –  Select an area of interest from faculty, discipline or employment categories.

Degree  –  Select from offered degrees, with choices organized in user-selected schemes such as alphabetical, by career type, by specialization families (eg. marketing, IMC, PR & advertising might be a family separate from accounting or finance within a business faculty’s degrees list), etc.

Details  –  Examine the important information relating to the program of study or degree you selected, which will include:

• Entry requirements
• Fees
• Duration and scheduling options
• Specialisations and other options within the degree
• Course requirements: List classes or units that are required and/or optional
• Study unit details: For each required or optional class or unit, include brief descriptions, exactly when they are offered, prerequisites, availability, instructors (plus links to detailed study outlines)
• Faculty: Detailed individual profiles of staff who teach the core components of the program
• Careers: Examples of career outcomes for students; not just a few titles, but including examples of work topics, work environments, daily routines and salary levels
• Alumni: Individual profiles and career details of a few alumni who completed the specific degree that is being viewed
• Application: Simple instructions on how to apply for and commence the program of study

For anyone who has recently attended university this outline will seem pretty straightforward. And, I expect, it will remind people how difficult it can be to collect this basic set of information.

Some university websites serve up study information better, some worse. But I’ve yet to see an example of a university website that makes me say “yes, everything I could want to know is right here”.

Here are some examples of better websites, focusing on graduate programs:

Xavier University (MBA) 
(perhaps the best I’ve seen; a lot of detail with only a few areas missing)

University of Notre Dame (History) 
(nice presentation and menu options, but tough to get to the details)

London Metropolitan University (Marketing)
(quite comprehensive, but with a bit more work it could be so much more)

Bond University (Marketing) 
(great presentation of the basics but further details are elusive)

The website of the university where I study, Queensland University of Technology, does a good job of providing detailed information with a minimum of mouse-clicks. The program I study can be found quite readily and its page satisfies the above list of program details reasonably well. (I wonder if, at some level, this influenced my study decisions.) Still, however, many of the above items are absent or incomplete: information about alumni, careers, faculty and applications are not served well on this page or elsewhere in the site.

I hesitate to start listing the worst websites. My blog host doesn’t give me unlimited storage. One worthwhile point, though: Even the best-looking designs and most clever structures can completely fail if the informational needs of users are not served efficiently. For example, Brown University’s site (which featured on Web Pages That Suck) has strong visual appeal and an original, animated navigation design – but try to find the above information and you’ll see that the clever start page is a thin veneer atop a rather useless website.

Having studied and worked at many universities I have occasionally heard the following statement made to excuse the poorly organised information and labyrinthine bureaucracy students must navigate:

“If someone can’t collect and understand the information they need to start their studies at university, how can they expect to finish a degree?”

Perhaps a more fair and balanced question is:

“If a university can’t clearly and coherently communicate the basic information that its customers need, how can it be trusted to competently provide an advanced education?”

A large and diverse organization like a university wrestles with a great challenge in satisfying its diverse range of audiences and each university performs differently in serving each group’s information needs. I think it is fair to say that, in spite of serious efforts, their core consumer audiences (one of which I tried to represent) are often being served quite poorly. This failing may occasionally stem from poor web development or poor IT & information management, but I suspect that most often it can be attributed to a general lack of consumer orientation. Universities, being too accustomed to their own bureaucracies and to their habitual, navel-gazing approaches to communications, are generally failing to serve the relatively simple needs of their customers.

Footnote 1: I have not even touched upon a very important, related topic: User-generated content. No university website I have seen employs any form of online community or forum (yet, paradoxically, every modern university is today teaching students of marketing, IT, etc. about the importance of that very subject). Since most universities can’t seem to serve their customers with a decent “web 1.0” site, perhaps we’ll have to wait for “web 4.0” before we’ll start to see web 2.0 emerge on university websites.

Footnote 2: Not all university website visitors, nor even all prospective students visiting the sites, will seek the same information that I did in my example. Parents might want to read about reputation, reporters might want a news-worthy tidbit, prospective undergrads might want to know about on-campus pubs and bars, and researchers might want links to academic publications. For a university, consumer orientation should fuel the pursuit to understand all relevant audiences’ needs and to provide information to suit them; the web is a very flexible tool for doing this yet at most universities it is under-utilised.