Summary
Thank you for taking the time to respond to our survey. Your answers were helpful and will guide us as we make changes to how news briefs work.
What have we learned? Basically, we have learned the categories are useful to some people but not vital to anyone. We could eliminate the category-based grouping on the home page—and perhaps eliminate categories altogether—without upsetting any of the respondents.
We also learned that a number of people do not understand the news briefs at all. We encourage you to take advantage of the help we offer through our training sessions and user groups. We offer something every week. Every tool that is available to you is there for a reason and many of the tools have capabilities that are not immediately obvious. Please let us help you.
Not Many People Responded
The overall response rate was low. We sent the survey announcement to all 180 people on our CHSSWeb user mailing list and also announced it in an article on the help site. Fifty-two recipients opened their emails (29%) and fourteen people took the survey. The low response rate is not surprising. We understand that you are busy. Since we cannot extract a representative sample, we will base our work on the folks who gave us feedback.
Most People Who Responded Use the News Briefs
Nine of the respondents (67%) use news briefs. Three do not and two respondents do not know if they use them.
News briefs automatically disappear from home pages as they age, but as of this moment, these sites are using them:
- Center for the Advancement of Well-Being
- College of Humanities and Social Sciences
- Communication
- Criminology, Law and Society
- Economics
- English
- History and Art History
- Linguistics
- New Century College
- Philosophy, Politics, and Economics
- Sociology and Anthropology
Out of the eleven sites currently using news briefs, eight are departments or colleges. This makes sense given the origins of and reasoning behind the news briefs feature.
People Use the Current Categories, and...
All of the categories are currently used, but In the Media (64%), Faculty Afoot (55%) and Accolades (45%) get the most use. We'd have to review those articles to be certain but I suspect that our takeaway here is that news briefs are frequently used to present faculty activity.
...Aren't Chafing for New Categories
Two respondents said they would like more categories. Both mentioned students, with one saying he or she "might add a student category, so that we can select between faculty, student and alumni news."
Nobody Would Weep for the Loss of the Categories
Six respondents (43%) would prefer to have no categories. Eight (57%) do not know how they would feel. The comments were interesting here.
One person who does not use categories does not do so for political reasons: "when staff are instructed to post an article or news item, it is assumed that it will be a full article under the main News & Updates heading. Our faculty, especially, would complain if their piece was not featured prominently."
Another was unclear on the concept of news briefs and another would just like to rename the categories and maybe eliminate a few.
And one respondent did a very good job of summing up why we created the news briefs feature: "I like them for quick items that do not need a long explanation or require me to find an image to associate with them. They are great for linking to media stories, etc."
We couldn't have said it better ourselves.
Thank you again for your time.