To avoid the problem of having no content on the page at all if students hadn’t left comments I want to use data that's already available for each course. I talked to students who said they would be more likely to leave feedback of some sort if there was basic data about the course already filled out.

To do this, I looked at the data that we already have about each course, provided by both the yellow booklet, and the Massey website:

• Name
• Description
• Semesters
• Course code
• Subject
• Credit amount
• Level
• Lecturer name
• Course costs
• Prerequisites
  

So, I decided to use that data that was already provided by the school, because I had tested and found out that students would be more likely to write feedback about a course that had some structure, like a name, bio, and lecturers. Plus, this means that the site is still useful to students even if there’s no comments from students – which is actually a huge part of getting feedback in the first place – because people actually need to use the damn thing. Plus, I’d be stupid to not use data that’s already available about a course.

After speaking with lecturers about the course feedback piece, they mentioned that the Call to Action to leave feedback about the course may not be enticing enough – and that maybe I should test a version where there’s some sort of super-easy rating method. I decided on using stars, as do popular book and food review websites

Feedback on V3:

– Stars might not be a good rating system, for some lecturers who are hard-ass, they might get a bad rating, when in reality their course was really useful – In v4 I will test with ‘I would recommend this course’

– The image that is in the course description section looks nice, but isn’t cohesive with the rest of the site, there aren’t other images with bounding boxes cut off – will remove this image in v4, because the reality is that most courses won’t even have 1 image, let alone 2

– “Choose your tomorrow” heading is too vague – will change to “Find your next elective”

– Feedback system still isn’t very compelling, hard to know what that button does “will it take me off this page or not?” – need to make it more clear what the CTA will do, and maybe make it stand out more visually, but will do more user testing to validate this

I wanted to design the site fully, filters and all, because I planned to build it to user test the upload process. Give the website to friends and 3rd & 4th years and see how it works out for them. Then go back and interview them.

My big problem that I need to solve now is the flow for getting students to upload work, and what would be motivating and encourage organic growth, without lecturers asking them to upload their work. That’s why I made the system of leaving a random anonymous comment, or uploading the blog link, or uploading the brief. I was given feedback by students that uploading a photo of the work would be a lot more effort than uploading the blog link.

I need to design the upload page, and start user testing. My current idea is to game-ify the upload process – something like tinder or a UI where you can answer a question, then either be done, or request another question. And the slight issue with this, since it requires input fields and actual work to be done, I sort of have to build it to test it. If I showed someone an upload field and asked them if they would upload a photo they might say “sure ill do that” but there’s a difference between them saying that, and them actually trying to dig out the photo from their hard drive and upload it.

I’ve been looking quite a bit about actually implementing this, and getting peoples opinions on the best way it could work. In my exploration I have gotten feedback from students and lecturers it might be really useful if the lecturer emailed students a link for them to fill out – other students have told me they ignore school emails. I need to clarify whether or not this goes against the rules of my brief which is “small action, big impact” and whether or not that means the site isn’t made by students, for students.

I assumed my challenge was “whatever it takes to get students to upload work” – whether it be by lecturers prompting them, or by their own doing. I would hope that I can do anything as long as the student recognises that their small action will have a big impact, and I want to design something that will work, not something that sounds good in theory and falls on its face in practice. Those details still need to be worked out with my lecturer.