Catherine has circulated the report of the subject portal usability testing. On the whole, the portals did well once students had found them. Making them more visible is an issue as is the need for more explanation of the relationship between journals and databases. What other suggestions do you have to improve the usability of the subject portals?
Having watched some student presentations in the last semester I have concluded that the way forward for the Portals is to make them more readily accessable via Google, as students ‘ preferred first port of call is Google ( insert teeth grinding noise here). There are implications in this for the way we structure the portal pages. I am continuing to think about this as I drive back and forth to Coalgate. ….I think we need to look at the kinds of pages that students prefer to use and model developments along those lines…. I suspect we will need to make pages more topic than subject based
I think we need to make referencing more visible – maybe a link from the home-page. Change the heading from Citation to Referencing?