The California State University (CSU) Dashboard is a website that can be used by CSU faculty and administrators to access and track student success rates. The CSU Dashboard website is a product of SAS Studio—a browser-based development environment that delivers “high-performance, in-database and in-memory analytics.” Utilized by the California State University system, the CSU Dashboard includes more than 15 years of data and provides predictive analytics to show administrators what is working well in terms of student success, and what needs to be improved. CSU administrators use the information from the Dashboard to lead data-driven discussions about how to better meet the needs of their students. The analytics provided by SAS enable the campus administrators to get a detailed picture of their colleges and departments, and have discussions about issues and interventions to improve success.
Heuristic Evaluation
In collaboration with two other evaluators, a heuristic evaluation was conducted on select CSU Faculty Dashboard pages website from the view point of faculty and administrators. The evaluation was completed by independently evaluating individual pages of the site, as per the Dashboard dev team’s request. The pages were evaluated using all ten of Nielsen’s (1995) heuristic guidelines to uncover both major (main text) and minor usability issues within the CSU Dashboard website.
User Test and Focus Group
The goal of this project was for the Dashboard development team to get a better understanding of faculty’s role in helping students succeed in their academic programs and graduate with their degrees on time. The Dashboard team observed a live, laboratory user test and focus group at the Center for Usability in Design and Accessibility (CUDA).
One administrator participated in the user test demonstration, conducted using Morae to capture the screen, voice and facial expressions. Five faculty members participated in a focus group of the CSU Dashboard, conducted using Camtasia to record the projector screen and the voices of the participants. Faculty provided general impressions of the CSU Dashboard and commented on specific pages of the website. Comments and quotes taken directly from the focus group transcript were used to write a content analysis report for the Dashboard team.
Amber Latham 