Your school or district website serves as the digital gateway to student success, parent engagement, and staff collaboration. To keep your website effective, you need to have a strong grasp of those key audiences. What do they need on the website? Can they find it easily? User feedback from parents, students, and staff is imperative. Here’s how you can use your school or district website to collect feedback right from the source!
User feedback is the heartbeat of a website's evolution. It offers insights into user satisfaction, identifies pain points, and guides decision-making processes for website improvements. Whether it's students seeking resources, parents looking for updates, or staff accessing internal information, every interaction shapes the user experience. User feedback guides your website’s improvement to better connect your community.
Your website should have the ability to build custom forms, so you can engage your users online. With forms, you can craft surveys to collect feedback directly from users. Use a combination of qualitative and quantitative fields to provide a range of input options for users.
When setting up your survey, ensure you’re keeping your questions clear and relevant. You don’t want to mislead or confuse users or make any submissions difficult to use. Combine different form fields, such as rating scales, open-ended questions, and demographic inquiries, to quickly collect information from users. Choose your questions carefully - if you have too many, users won’t fill out the form! They should be able to fill out your survey in a couple of minutes, so be careful of using too many open-ended questions that take a long time to answer.
Prioritize simplicity and accessibility when putting together your survey. Ensure the form is easy to navigate and mobile-responsive (your website provider should ensure that any forms on your websites are mobile-friendly!). Integrating online forms seamlessly into the website enhances user convenience, encouraging more frequent and meaningful interactions. You can add a button link at the bottom of a page to direct traffic, or place a link on your home page or in pop-up for more visibility.
If your survey is only collecting submissions for a dedicated time-frame, ensure that time-frame is clearly indicated. Your website should have the capability to receive and manage form submissions in real time. Once your form is closed for submissions, you may need to export the data for analysis and review.
Once feedback is compiled and analyzed, you can prioritize suggestions based on their impact and feasibility. When you do make a change based on user feedback, share the update with your community! A follow up blog post acknowledging the value of your community’s input can help build trust in your community and demonstrate your commitment to continuous improvement and user satisfaction.
Implementing surveys and feedback forms is not merely a technical task; it's a strategic commitment to building a user-centered school website that reflects the changing needs and expectations of its diverse stakeholders. By actively soliciting and acting upon user feedback, you can foster a culture of continuous improvement, ensuring that your website remains a dynamic hub for learning, engagement, and community collaboration.