Get Feedback From School Leavers On Your Web Content
When was the last time that you asked school leavers or Year 11 learners what they think about your college’s website content?
Over the coming months whilst your colleagues are promoting your college to schools we strongly recommend that you take the opportunity to ask your prospective full-time learners for their feedback on your college’s website.
One of the most valuable parts of the FE College Website Best Practice Project was to ask Year 11 learners to visit FE and Sixth Form college websites.
We asked the participants to think of a qualification or vocational course they would like to pursue and to assess how effective the various college websites were in:
- Providing the relevant course information
- Promoting the benefits of studying at college
- Outlining the next steps should they wish to either request further information or to enrol
Although many colleges have told us they do actively seek feedback from school leavers, too many rely solely on feedback based on printouts of web content.
The key, in our opinion, is to observe school leavers as they sit in front of the PC and navigate your college’s website.
If you have ever agonised or argued with your colleagues about what content or images should appear on your college’s website then watching how your target audience navigates your site can offer you invaluable feedback.
Here’s some tips to how to set up your own feedback session:
- Identify the website content you would like to evaluate and your target audience
- Decide where you would like to run the feedback sessions – at your college or a school
- Decide on the ideal size of user group (5 participants should give you significant feedback)
- Ask for willing volunteers who are willing to participant (30 minutes of their time to navigate site and offer feedback)
- Set them a specific task so you can observe their activities
- Ask the participants to oultine what they are doing and why (and also give feedback on the content / images of pages navigating)
If you are doing this at your college or on site using college laptops then you can always use screen capture software to record your participants movements or feedback.
You will be amazed at the feedback you will receive.
More importantly it can make you realise what a waste of time it is to spend hours in meetings arguing about content ideas when you can go directly to your target audience and gain a clear understanding of what they like and what they ignore
Have a look at what school leavers told us about FE College websites…
