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The Campus Portal
5 Best Practices
9/2/2008
So much has changed since those early campus portal efforts! Heed these tips in five best practice areas, and get it right.
Not that many years back, portals were nothing more than splash pages
from which users could click on links to navigate a school's web-based resources.
Today, however, they are much more: single sign-on gateways that easily enable users
to do everything from pay tuition and view transcripts, to purchase parking permits
and sell used books.
Still, engineering portals isn't easy. Many schools embrace the challenge on their own, employing programmers who can write custom code in HTML, Java, XML, and other languages. Other schools pay for portal prowess, turning to vendors such as Jenzabar, Datatel, and open-source guru Unicon for their expertise. Yet, no matter how your school approaches (or plans to approach) portals, following these five steps can make portal projects more powerful.
1) Survey, Survey, Survey
Before you get going on your portal, it's a great idea to figure out what your users want. One way to do this is to guess. An infinitely better way is to ask them, via web-based surveys and special focus groups. This was precisely the strategy at Southern Adventist University (TN), where, earlier this year, representatives from the school's information processing department interviewed hundreds of student and faculty users before even thinking about planning myAccess, the school's most recent portal implementation.
The process began in 2006, when, through a web-based survey linked to SAU's existing portal, technologists discovered that ease of navigation was more important to users than content itself. Inspired by this inside scoop, technologists created a navigation bar that appeared across the top of every page of the portal. They also created "navigation by topic" off the main menu, and provided additional navigation by constituency: separate menu bars for students, faculty, and staff members alike.
Ironically, "Navigation was on our list, but it wasn't even in the top five," says Herdy Moniyung, associate director of information processing. "Suddenly, we asked ourselves, 'What else are these people going to want from this technology, that we aren't thinking about?'"
To make sure they would stay on top of user need, when the new navigation went live in 2007, the IT department placed a big "Feedback" button on the portal, in an attempt to make it easier for users to provide unsolicited comments. Simultaneously, the school's Marketing department sponsored additional surveys, and the University Relations team got involved to pull students, faculty, and staff members into focus groups for face-to-face questioning. By the time the last focus group concluded in January 2008, the school had polled more than 1,000 users to find out what other navigational improvements users were looking for. The process revealed even more surprises.
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