I know what students are searching for because, well, there’s a search box on this blog and I’m keeping track of each and every single search query.
Why is this useful? It’s helping me discover how to organise the Unisa modules on the new WikiStudent site.
Here are some of the search terms that have been used:
Management (also “purchasing management”, “financial management”, “strategic management”)
Psychology (also “industrial psychology”)
Law (also “criminal law”, “international law”, “labour law”, “strafreg”, “LLB”)
and “economics”, “linguistics”, “accounting”… and much more!
Since students are searching for these words, it makes a lot of sense for these words to appear as links on the home page. I’m going to present them in a tag cloud, and here is a mock-up of what it will look like:
There have been dozens and dozens of subject-related searches and they can’t each have their own tag for the tag cloud, so they’ll have to be grouped (See the groupings quoted above).
Unisa has colleges, departments, and subjects, but WikiStudent is simply going to have categories 
What’s more, the names of the WikiStudent categories are NOT going to map to Unisa college, department or subject names - they will be words people are actually searching for.
Do you even know the name of your college? Nobody is searching for “the college of science, engineering and technology”. The reality is that people are searching for “hons accounting” and “Financial mathematic” and making spelling mistakes.
What an important usability principle: Speak the user’s language!
Let me summarise 3 great reasons for having a category tag cloud on the home page of WikiStudent:
- This one little box gives you a quick overview of what subjects are on the wiki
- Prospective students don’t know course codes - it’s easier to understand subject names
- If you’re the kind of person who likes to navigate by browsing rather than searching, you’ll prefer this to the search box!
I am a very organised person and I LOVE structure and completeness, so my natural inclination is to organise everything by hierarchy, but I can see it is not a good idea to mimick Unisa’s structure because:
- There are not an equal number of students taking each module. WikiStudent can exclude most Unisa modules from the list. (But hey, if you’re the single solitary student studying Mandarin Chinese and want to create a wiki page for it, go ahead!)
- Drilling down a hierarchy (college–> department –> subject) wastes time. On WikiStudent, all subjects will be one or two clicks away from the home page.
- Studens don’t use Unisa’s college and department names, but are concerned with the specific courses they’re taking. It would be a mistake to get my category names from Unisa’s site. The logs from my search box are a much better source of information!
