Surely everyone has noticed by now that we are in the midst of a redesign of MyUSI. Before the start of the school year, we upgraded the part of MyUSI that we call the portal. It’s where you can register for classes, check your grades, read your email, and login to Blackboard among other things. It is the most important part of MyUSI. But, we envision MyUSI to be that and much more.

A few weeks ago we rolled out MyUSI Student, a blogging platform that gives each and every student on campus a place to publish on the web. We envision it as a place for you to write about your college experience, both academic and non-academic, to communicate with friends, and to share your thoughts. Around the same time, we also released MyUSI Media, a site for publishing and distributing rich media online. It’s intended as way for academic units and departments on campus to communicate with the university community at large by sharing news, information, podcasts, and vodcasts. We look forward to seeing that site evolve in the coming months. Along with those efforts, we’ve redesigned the front login page of MyUSI to make everything seem more unified. We hope you like it. (There is a survey that ends today to find out if did.)

Today we are releasing MyUSI Faculty, which will offer for faculty & staff what MyUSI Student does for our student body. For more information on the release of MyUSI Faculty read the Welcome Message.

We have a lot of ideas for MyUSI. We know that the core of MyUSI, the portal, is something you have to use, but we want all of MyUSI to be something you want to use. To that end, we are trying to understand what you want and expect online here at the University of Southern Indiana. We will be publishing surveys and we encourage you to respond. We’ve ran two surveys already and today we published the results of the first survey on your usage of MyUSI. We also encourage you to follow this blog and to give feedback. Share with us your ideas and your opinions. We can’t guarantee we’ll meet each and every expectation, but we can’t meet any of them unless we know what you want.

Help us make a better MyUSI!

We are releasing the results of the first survey we posted on September 21. This survey was an informal look into your usage of the MyUSI portal. You can look at the results online or download them as a PDF (see the end of this post).

Although the survey was informal, we felt like we gathered some important data. A few results stuck out at us. We would like to share them with you. Please remember, that these are no more than observations we made while looking at the data.

First, among all the activities available to you in the MyUSI portal, checking email and accessing Blackboard were the two most frequent activities users did when logging in. Lagging behind these two, somewhat surprisingly, was accessing Banner Self-Service and reading Campus and Personal Announcements, both of which can only be accomplished from the portal. Other activities were were only done by a few people, such as accessing Groups, checking the Loft’s Menu, etc.

Second, we were surprised to see respondents didn’t use some services as we had thought. One of the main benefits of a portal is that you can customize the information you see once you login. However, 72.6% of respondents have never customized their portal or didn’t know that it was possible to do so. Groups are another feature of our portal. It allows Campus Communities to have their own social network for communication, collaboration, etc. With regards to using Groups, 88% of respondents had not used or did not know about them. Finally, we also include channels in the portal that display news and information. We call these channels RSS Channels because they use a syndication technology called Really Simple Syndication. The details of how these channels work aren’t important. What was interesting is that 98.4% of respondents didn’t have a favorite feed or didn’t know what an RSS feed was (this might make for a good tutorial in the future).

We draw no conclusions from these results. Instead we are publishing them for you to see. Feel free to read through the results yourself and leave a comment or question here on this post. We welcome any discussion these results might start.

• Results
• Download (.pdf)

Labeling parts of MyUSI as beta software is our way of saying that we feel pretty good about MyUSI Student, MyUSI Media, and MyUSI Faculty (which we hope to launch soon, by the way), but we know we could always make it better. More than likely there are bugs, quirks, and glitches that we haven’t seen yet. But, you might see them and if you do then post a comment on this page so that we can fix them.

Also, being in beta means we are open to your feedback. Leave your opinions and suggestions as comments here as well. We’d like to hear them!

A new survey was released today to get your feedback on the redesign we have applied to MyUSI. We will leave this survey up for two weeks. Please respond and be honest about your feedback. Your answers will give us an idea of how we are doing and let us know how and where we should move forward.

Our first survey on MyUSI Usage also ended today. It had been running over the last two weeks and we got a lot of good feedback. Once we have finished analyzing the responses we collected, we plan to share it with you here on this blog. Look for that in the next week or so.

Anyway, take the new survey that was released today and if you have any questions, feel free to comment.

Welcome to the MyUSI Web Development Blog. We are starting this blog as a way to communicate with members of the university community about the development and direction of MyUSI. There are several ways we plan to do this. One is through the use of surveys. We will announce frequent surveys on this site to get your answers on a variety of issues relating to MyUSI. We will also use this site to publish the results of those surveys. Also, at least once a month, we will publish statistics about the use of MyUSI: how many page hits does it receive, what is the most used browser,etc. Finally, we will announce new features and new developments on this blog as they happen.

Why are we doing all of this and blogging about it? In short, because we want you to be involved. After all, MyUSI is your USI home page.