How Studyportals measures Students’ Satisfaction

Studyportals continuously gathers feedback to improve the experience of our portals and reveal the areas of improvement to further increase student satisfaction.

Since October 2018 Studyportals uses Standardised User Experience Percentile Rank Questionnaire (SUPR-Q) to measure student satisfaction. SUPR-Q method helps Studyportals produce a comprehensive, reliable, and valid measure of the UX  to continuously improve the services to our portals’ visitors.

70% of the feedback we received in 2020 is purely positive, the rest 30% we use to inform our product decisions and improve our data.

We take great pride in the positive comments we receive, such as:

‘This website is an amazing resource for compiling a list of programs of interest and makes it easy to keep everything organized. I have already recommended it to friends and family!’

While Studyportals receives a lot of positive feedback from our visitors we value and make use out of constructive comments. Here is an example of constructive criticism we have received from one of Studyportals user:

‘Sometimes the requirements don’t match with the university websites. I hope you solve this problem in your new UI updates. This UI is better than the previous one.’

User experience, usability and trust 

User experience (UX) can be understood as a user’s interaction with the company and its services or products that influence the user’s perceptions and responses. User experience supports user behaviour by designing a system that offers a great experience to its users by integrating how users perceive and interact with a product/service to improve usability, desirability, accessibility, the usefulness of the product or service.

Measuring the UX of websites should encompass more than just perception of usability, (Sauro J., 2015), the key element is trust and visual appeal. Visitors who do not trust a website, their brand, information tend to look for services elsewhere. Hence, Studyportals uses SUPR-Q to measure UX to increase the likelihood of delivering services that satisfy our visitors’ needs.

HOW SUPR-Q works 

SUPR-Q measures (Sauro J., 2015):

Usability:  

• This website is easy to use.
• It is easy to navigate within the website

Credibility: (Trust, Value & Comfort)

• The information on the website is credible
• The information on the website is trustworthy

Loyalty:  

• How likely are you to recommend this website to a friend or colleague?
• I will likely visit this website in the future

Appearance:  

• I found the website to be attractive
• The website has a clean and simple presentation

SUPR-Q assesses more than a single factor of UX which helps to produce a more valid measure of the true perception of UX. In October 2020, Studyportals had 367 responses with an overall score of 4.12 ± 0.10 out of 5. See below how Studyportals scored on each measure:

• Usability: 4.12
• Credibility: 3.97
• Loyalty: 4.21
• Appearance: 4.20
• NPS: 30 (8.11/10)

In the last two years, in total, we gathered 11,908 responses from our engaged visitors. 2062 of those provided a meaningful explanation of their scores. Every month we cluster those explanations in different themes such as:

• General content quality
• User interface
• Tuition fees