The Campus Portal
5 Best Practices
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.
At Southern Adventist University (TN), the portal team
surveyed users and discovered that faculty wanted to use
the portal to access class rosters complete with
student headshots for quick identification in class.
Students wanted a portal destination where they could
receive alerts about pending registration issues, overdue
library books, and other logistical issues. Everyone wanted
better navigation, a need the team hadn't even anticipated.
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.