Emotional intelligence and the student portal

Part of the first phase of requirements gathering for the student portal involved focus groups with students. We wanted to identify what students used most frequently on the website and what they found hard or easy, in order to identify and prioritise the functionality developed for the portal.

One of the exercises we did in the student focus groups was based on some research by Paul Adams, lately of the Google user experience team and now of Facebook, published in a Slideshare presentation called The real life social network.

Paul found from his research that in 'real life', most people are careful to distinguish the information they share with different groups of people - this is considered a normal social skill. (See slides 53-84 for a fuller explanation. It is clear how much this research has influenced the development of Google Plus.)

Yet online, one of the usability issues with Facebook (for example) is that users end up with one huge list of 'friends' and no way of easily targeting status updates or other posts so you share different content with real friends than with family, work colleagues or housemates.

We wanted to see if this also applied to the type of channel that people chose to communicate with, so when we ran this exercise with students, we also asked them to identify the methods they used to communicate with each group. Although the student portal is a different type of application to Google Plus or Facebook, in that it is not primarily a social network for connecting with people, we found a fairly consistent set of preferences emerged for the channels people wanted to use in their role as a student. These results were reinforced in the student survey, with a much larger response rate of 2300.

Users expressed a strong preference to keep Facebook for communications on a social level, eg with friends or housemates, and to use University channels such as the VLE for communication with teaching staff and their department. This makes sense: most people don't communicate in the same way - or with the same group of people - on a dating website as they might on LinkedIn or the VLE; the people who do really stand out.

Of the top ten pieces of content / functionality that students wanted to to be available in the student portal, the tenth was access to social networking.

But giving students access to social networking tools or features, such as a 'like' button on an event which might show how many of their Facebook friends are attending, is a different thing from providing content on Facebook or Twitter. The objections to this are less that the University is not cool, than that the University has a formal relationship with students and it is 'socially inept' to use personal or social spaces for formal communication.

These findings have implications both for the content of the student portal and the University's work in social networking sites, one of the key points being that the channel you use is as important as the way you communicate.