ICS Graduate Student Information Needs

ICS 205, Spring 2002

11 Introduction

Since the Internet has been invented, people have increasingly relied on it for their information needs. Today, nearly any type of information can be found on the world-wide-web. Furthermore, large organizations are now expected by their clients and members to have information rich and user-friendly websites. If such a website does not exist for a particular organization, then the fact is negatively reflected upon it. Therefore it is very important for an organization to have a satisfactory website.

In this paper, we analyze the information needs of information and computer science (ICS) students at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in hopes providing useful hints for improving the current ICS website. Our analysis is based two research methods, which are explained in the following section. The results are described in section 3, followed by the analysis in section 4 and a conclusion in section 5.

2Research Methods

We had several research methods to chose from in order to satisfy our goal of eliciting information needs from ICS graduate. Several methods, such as simulations and judgment studies, were not considered due to unreasonable implementation efforts or an unmatched problem domain (such as a lab experiment). As a result we selected to use surveys and semi-structured interviews, which are described in the following subsections. It should be noted here that we also contemplated arranging a focus group. Unfortunately, due to time constraints and complicated schedules of graduate students, we decided to forgo that option.

2.1Semi-Structured Interview

Interviews can be performed in several ways. We chose to do our interviews in a semi-structure fashion. This means that our interviews are guided by some preplanned questions (see Appendix section 6.1). Semi-structured interviews provide us with the advantage of eliminating uncomfortable silences during an interview, since preplanned questions are always available as icebreakers. They also allow us to probe the interviewee for information while giving him or her the freedom to express their opinions, even if they do not directly pertain to a particular question.

Fortunately, being graduate students ourselves, we were able to have a brainstorming session in which we created interview questions that we expected would effectively extract information needs from other students in our field. The questions essentially ask the basic what, where, and how students obtain their information needs. Several of the questions are geared around the current website since that is where we expect our interviewees find most of their information. In addition, to further probe interviewees, we ask questions about the old ICS website in order to jog their memory in hopes of them remembering something that is no longer available on the current website. As shown in appendix section 6.1 the questions are quite general and are unbiased.

After having prepared these questions we scheduled 8 interview sessions with graduate ICS colleagues and friends. We took care to request 30 minutes despite the fact that the interview took only 15 to 20 minutes on average. This was done in order to ensure adequate time for all of the questions.

The interviews were most often conducted in the interviewees’ offices. Typical interviews were initiated by a brief introduction from the interviewer. This is followed by a description of the purpose of the interview and a promise of confidentiality to their interviewee. The interviewee’s name, current year at UCI, concentration, and graduate status are then recorded. Next the actual interview, guided by the questions, takes place. When done, the interviewer quickly verifies his or her understanding of the information needs with the interviewee. Then, of course, a word of thanks is exchanged and the interview is over.

2.2Survey

Although interviews are very useful for discovering information needs, they unfortunately require too much time to perform and analyze. Hence, that is why only 8 interviews were carried out. In response to this issue, we distributed 21 surveys to ICS graduate students who were willing to cooperate with our research, but did not have enough time to participate in a more time consuming interview.

The questions in this survey directly reflect those which we produced in the brainstorming session for the semi-structured interview. The only question that had to be significantly modified, such that it can fit is the survey format, is the one that asks, “What kind of information do you usually look for?” The response to this question is a set of information categories, such as “course requirements” and “lab info” as well as an “other” section. These categories were derived from a list of all possible information needs that we could think of as ICS graduate students (see Appendix section 6.3 for the list).

3Results

The following subsections outline ICS graduate student information need statistics, which were derived from the interviews and surveys. Then section 3.2 outlines the different types of information, which are currently not being provided by the ICS website.

3.1Information Need Statistics

As we mentioned before, all of our research subjects, as well as ourselves, are the ICS graduate students. Therefore, when we brainstormed the information needs, we could get several categories related on the information for the survey. Those categories are course requirements, course schedules, ICS events, scholarship information, university rankings, lab information, phase II information, directory of students and faculties, commencement information and TA information. Most of the information needs would be one of the categories or related information. Questions of survey and interview are attached in the appendix.

Based on the 21 questionnaires and 8 interviews with the graduate students, here is a brief statistics of the user group.

Name / Interview / Survey / Total (29)
Year / 1st / 2 / 8 / 10
2nd / 5 / 7 / 12
3rd / 1 / 3 / 4
more / 1 / 1
N/A / 2 / 2
Grad / MS / 1 / 7 / 8
PhD / 7 / 14 / 21
Specialization / CSD / 10 / 3 / 13
Software / 4 / 3 / 7
IAM / 1 / 1
General / 3 / 3
N/A / 3 / 3
CSN / 2 / 2
How often do you use this website?
daily / 6 / 3 / 9
weekly / 7 / 1 / 8
monthly / 8 / 4 / 12
yearly / 0

Most of them are first and second year graduate students. Among 29 students, 21 students are in the PhD program and the other 8 students are M.S. students. For their specialization, thirteen students are in the division of Computer System Design and seven students are in the Software group. The other nine students are from IAM, general program and Computer System and Network (CSN).

As you can see in figure 1, most of the students are interested in the course information like course requirements or course schedules for one academic year. And the contact points of the graduate students and faculties are one of the most requested information like the address of the websites, telephone number of their office, or the right spelling of the name.

Some students mentioned about the problems of the current ICS website and it is also the information needs from the user group because they also want to retrieve those types of information. Course description is not up to date and hard to find intuitively. They commented that at first, they had to navigate several times to find the right link related on the course description. The schedule of classes for the academic year is also needed.

Figure 2 - User Information Needs Statistics

3.2Suggestions for Improvement

According to our surveys and interviews, the information needs listed below are not currently being met by the ICS website. Although some of this information may be available on the website, it is too difficult to find.

  1. A schedule of classes with information on the current quarter as well as a tentative forecast of courses to be offered that academic year could be very useful. This seemed to be the most voiced requirement.
  1. More detailed and updated information on candidacy requirements and Phase II exam for different tracks needs to be available under the graduate link.
  1. A search feature on the ICS website would be useful. The Quick Navigation that is currently available does not meet frequently used informational needs most times.
  1. The ICS page could contain news about ICS events, talks and seminar especially if famous researchers are visiting.
  1. Links from the ICS website to important student information on the Registrar’s website for e.g., ‘Television login
  1. Students should be able to track their status as in GSR/RA level through the website.
  1. The mailing address that students should use for on-campus delivery should be mentioned on the website.
  1. Computing homepage: Although students were happy that there is a web page for information on Linux security, they point out that the information is quite old (1998). This needs updating. Also, the computing support homepage should include specific information for new graduate students for the Sun machines on how to setup mail filters, how to invoke certain compilers [the ‘module add’ commands] etc.
  1. The front page of the ‘Computing support’ website is currently blank. This can be used to display news about viruses or probably a copy of the email newsletter that is sent out or could have links to the three most frequently accessed information on that web page.
  1. The faculty list of the current quarter is obsolete.

Although the focus of our interview was collecting informational requirements, we did come across a few usability suggestions that we include in this section.

  1. The navigation menu on the left side on the ICS website should have a pop-up menu to show what information each link leads to. This would eliminate various intermediary navigational clicks for the user. This was again a very frequent observation. Most students felt that the content organization is not intuitive enough.
  1. ‘Calendar’ and ‘Jobs’ links in upper right corner would fit better on the left side links table since this currently splits the user focus into two areas.
  1. Link to ‘Academic computing policy’ is hard to find.

Students prefer to meet with the counselor for the following information:

Information particular to their specific case that they can't find on the website or cases where the generic information on the website would not apply to them. For example,

  1. Policies about Internship and fellowship programs
  2. Policies about TA Fellowship and TA evaluation information
  3. Details on Phase II examination and candidacy requirements
  4. Substitution of courses, for example from Engineering to ICS.

4Analysis

Our data analysis is divided into three segments. The first discusses sampling population and research method concerns. Then, ICS graduate student information needs are evaluated, followed by a discussion regarding usability and website satisfaction comments.

4.1Sampling Population and Method Concerns

As discussed above, our data consists of responses from a total of 8 interviews, 21 questionnaires, and notes that we wrote down during our brainstorming session. Since all our group members are ICS graduate students, we felt that adding our responses, despite possible biases, would be useful for overcoming shortcomings that may result from our interview and survey methods.

Due to time constraints, the majority of students who participated in this project were first or second year Computer Systems Design Ph.D. students. Although we realize that this sample is not very representative of the ICS graduate student population as a whole, we found that most of the responses can be reasonably generalized to the rest the student population. This sample is unlikely to hold biases that would seriously skew our interpretation of the results. There are two specific issues that we would like to at least mention though. First, the fact that the majority of our respondents/interviewees are first and second year students resulted in many comments about course information and schedules. Since the first two years is the time during which Ph.D. (and obviously Masters) students take their courses, course information is clearly a strong concern for them. We would expect though that older students would not be as interested in this but rather information that relates more specifically to their specific research areas. Secondly, we would like to mention that the frequency of a student’s usage of the ICS website is likely to affect their responses. Older students (3+ years) are less likely to use the site and also, the more frequent the user the stronger the responses tend to be. For example, a student who uses the site only once a month is less likely to want or need a lot of information from the site. He has probably found a different source to go to when he needs to find something. On the other hand, a student who uses the ICS website daily will probably have more to say regarding likes and dislikes. Since the majority of our interviewees/respondents mentioned that the last time they accessed the website was within the last week, we are confident that the answers we received reflect current student attitudes and opinions.

4.2Information Needs

There are two main pieces of information that we found to be most important by the students: course information/schedules and student/faculty directories. Typically, students wanted to find descriptions of the various courses (e.g. which professor is teaching it, what topics will be covered, course textbooks, etc.), which courses are required for different concentrations, and a course schedule of classes that will be offered for year in advance. Interestingly, when the members of our group were reviewing these responses, we realized that a course schedule is in fact available on the ICS website but that the students who gave this response clearly did not know this. In fact, only half of our group members were aware that this schedule existed before the discussion. As a result of the number of requests for this, we would like to suggest that this link be advertised explicitly, perhaps within the general academic information e-mail that is occasionally sent to all graduates. With regards to the student/faculty directories, although a number of students use this aspect of the site, few comments were made about on this topic. Generally, students requested that this information be kept more up to date, that the directory be easier to access and navigate, and that a directory of undergraduates be available.

4.3Usability and Website Satisfaction Comments

Despite this project being a user information needs study, there were a number comments addressing navigational and organizational concerns for the website. Although these are not the focus of our project, we would like to include them simply as additional information for your evaluation. We found that over half of the students were not satisfied with the current site. We also found that a majority preferred the current site over the old site and that 6 of the 19 survey respondents did not even realize that there was an older site. We attribute this number to the fact that many of our respondents are first and second year students who may not have been around to see the website change. For those who were unsatisfied with the current ICS website, organization and navigation problems were primarily cited as the reasons.

5Conclusion

The purpose of this study has been to shed light upon the types of information needs ICS graduate students have. This report will hopefully assist UCI organizations, such as the ICS Student Affairs office, in making beneficial improvements to the current ICS website. If any changes are made, we recommend that they improve access to the types of information we have shown to be most valuable to these graduate students. This information includes, course requirements and schedules as well as student and faculty directories (see section 3). In addition to efficient access, this information must be kept up to date, otherwise it useless to the students. Also, even though our focus regards information needs, several comments were made by interviewees regarding website usability issues (see sections 3.2 and 4.3 for more detailed information). Therefore, the ICS website would also profit from a redesign via a human-computer interaction point of view.

6Appendix

6.1Interview Questions

Interview Questions

  • Introduce yourself
  • Briefly describe the purpose of the interview
  • Ask for 30 minutes
  • Mention confidentiality
  • Record the following:
  • Name
  • Year
  • Masters or PhD
  • Concentration
  • When was the last time you accessed the ICS website?
  • What did you look for last time?
  • How often do you access it?
  • What kind of information do you usually look for?
  • Is there any information that you’ve found that is not complete?
  • Which info?
  • How can that information be improved?
  • What type of information do you ask of the counselors?
  • Is that information already available on the website?
  • What info have you not been able to find?
  • Are you satisfied with the ICS website as it currently is?
  • What information is most valuable to you?
  • Is there information on the old website that does not exist on the current site?
  • Is there anything else you would like to add? Any comments you’d like to make about the website?
  • Summarize you’re understanding of their needs and make sure that the interviewee agrees with it.
  • Thank the interviewee and leave.

6.2The Survey

Name:______Year:______Specialization:______Masters/PhD (circle one)