At the end of 2017 we sent out a survey to our website community to find out what EdWeb features was the top priority for them. We got a great response – the best ever! 204 people responded casting a total of 985 votes. We’ll share the results of the survey and what the next steps will be.

Why we conduct the survey

The survey is a very important way of getting the community involved via a democratic process to feedback on the future of EdWeb. It helps us prioritise and put our development resources to work on the most important features. It’s all about establishing a two way conversation and allowing the people that matter the most (our editors) to contribute to our process of continuous improvement.

Survey results

The survey consisted of some demographic questions and then a set of 28 features. Each respondent was allowed to vote for their top 5 features. The top 9 responses received over 50% of the vote.

And these are as follows:

1. Image position (8.6% of the vote)
2. Content removal (6.7%)
3. Website design enhancements (6.3%)
4. Table enhancements (5.6%)
5. Image galleries (5.6%)
6. Overview page flexibility enhancements (5.5%)
7. Tracking link references (5.4%)
8. News publishing (4.1%)
9. Integrating external services (4.0%)

Total 51.8 %

The full text for the statements can be seen at the end of this post.

Survey demographics

Which College or Support Group do you primarily associate yourself with?

We had a really good spread of responses across the 3 colleges and 3 support groups. This is important as it allows us to breakdown the data in a bit more detail as there can be some fundamental differences between the different units.

For all units image position, content removal and image galleries had a high level of agreement with all these items appearing in their top 9.

Spread of responses from the University Colleges and Support Groups

• Arts, humanities and social sciences with 17.10%,
• Medicine and Veterinary Medicine with 19.69%,
• Science and Engineering with 13.47%,
• Information Services with 15.03%,
• University secretary’s group with 22.80%
• and Corporate services with 11.92%

Select your role which best describes your position in the University

Again we had a good response across most of the University role categories we’d identified. The smaller response from the academic and senior manager or head of school categories are to be expected as their job is associated less with the actual day to day mechanics of website management.

Spread of responses across different categories of University roles

• Clerical assistant / Junior administrator with 7.77%,
• Office manager / Senior administrator with 20.73%,
• Computing officer / Technical specialist with 18.13%,
• Communications or Marketing specialist with 26.42%,
• Other professional discipline with 18.13%,
• Academic with 4.66%
• Senior manager / Head of School or Unit with 4.15%

Conclusions

The survey is just one of many ways we interact with our web publishing community. We have our regular community sessions but we also gather information at our EdWeb training events and at our support clinics. All emails that come in to our support email address are dealt with but are also logged and go to a separate issue review meeting. Obviously we can’t do everything so a lot of prioritisation goes on. The survey is just one of the ways that really helps us to do this. It’s also important to be data driven. It’s great and extremely helpful hearing about issues over coffee int the break at our community sessions but we need to know the strength of opinion over the whole University.

Next steps

The next step is analyse the data in a bit more depth and then start to break these top priorities down into tasks that we can develop over the next 6 months to a year. Just in the same way we did with the previous survey. We’ll then add these tasks to our EdWeb development road map.

May 2016 – our previous EdWeb feature prioritisation survey results

How the previous survey steered development

There are many different factors at play here so it’s not just a matter of taking an approach of tackling each of these priorities as if they were in order in total isolation. We have a number of different strands to take into consideration including our planned move to the new version of Drupal 8 and our development and design resources.

How to keep informed of EdWeb progress

As we make decision on what development is coming next we will continue to inform the community via this blog and also our monthly web publishers community events.

Web Publishers’ Community wiki (EASE login needed)

Previous community events

From previous feedback we found that editors sometimes ask for functionality that already exists in EdWeb. We know it’s hard to keep track of everything so we’ve put on a number of presentations to address this.

You might be surprised EdWeb can….

We will also continue to send out an email summary when we deploy new functionality or bug fixes to EdWeb and update the blog at the same time.

Complete history of EdWeb deployments

Full wording of top response statements