Results of recent survey!

There was an outstanding response to the Web usability survey with more than 1800 total respondents. Of those, nearly 70 percent were current NC State faculty, staff and students.

Nearly 66 percent of the respondents indicated that they came to the NC State site to get specific information. This may correlate with the overwhelming percentage of current faculty, staff and students that responded to the survey.

More than 90 percent of people indicated that they accomplished their goals when visiting the site and didn't "get lost." Among the most visited parts of the whole NC State site were the news features, athletics and registration and records. The lowest overall indicator was the 28 percent "poor" rating for the design and organization of the site.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the survey feedback was some of the individual comments that people offered. Among the most common were that there were too many links and listings to choose from on secondary pages and that the homepage needed a more dynamic look and feel and updated content and features. There were also several suggestions for improving the ability to navigate and quickly get information such as improving the search functionality, making contact numbers easily found and adding an A-Z index list for all university-related sites.

Some specific things were also requested including having webmail more prominent, improving the campus map, virtual tour and making financial information easily found and understandable.

Finally, there were also a large number of respondents that indicated that they were very happy with the current site design and functionality and didn't want to see a lot of changes.

Thanks for the tremendous amount of feedback. We will try to consider as much as possible as we move through this re-design process.

Top College Websites.

Thanks to Don Schmidt in NC State's ITD department for sending us the following links to review:

A recent survey of 100 College web sites whose findings were presented to the AMA Symposium on Higher Education in Chicago in 2005.

A detailed version that including methodology of the 2004 year survey.

One interesting thing to note -- most of the sites that are ranked tend to be small, private schools. While these sites are interesting and will provide some good things to consider they also don't face the complicated navigation challenges that the NC State site (potentially) does.

Alum Wins ACC Tourney Tickets

Congratulations to NC State alum Ashley Rankin who was the winner of two randomly-drawn tickets to the 2006 ACC Tournament. Ashley is a 2005 graduate in chemistry who is now a scientist for Syngenta Biotechnology. Over 1,800 people responded to the www.ncsu.edu survey, providing valuable feedback that will be considered as the site is re-designed.

The goal of the project is to improve the usability, content and physical appearance of the home page and top-level pages of www.ncsu.edu. The homepage averages nearly 3 million hits per month and represents an important opportunity to communicate NC State’s strengths and to offer accessible information to a variety of audiences.