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)