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Mémoires Année : 2018

Understanding trends and users' experiences with graduate studies application forms in France

Résumé

Higher education institutions use many forms to run their daily operations (Di Carlo, 2016, Tank, 2016). As Di Carlo (2016) says, “the main gateway into anything a university does for its students, staff, or faculty is a form” and the application forms prospective students use are no exception. The application form may be the first formal interaction an applicant has with an institution but it remains an under-noticed area of the application experience (Trasher, 2017). Institutions may not realize it but for prospective students, the application process can be a long, stressful and frustrating experience. One reason could be the absence of detailed information on the application process (Sherwin, 2016) resulting in applicants having little understanding of the workings of the procedure and feeling anxious. Another reason could be institutions design application forms from an “inside out” perspective (Wroblewski, 2008) which means they think of the information they need in their databases to process an application and ask applicants for this information using administrative language. The issue is applicants think about forms in very different terms. They want to study in a given program and the form is a means of achieving this goal. Most studies tend to address problems with forms by focusing on the technological and aesthetic attributes of a form. However, having a well laid out and interactive form does not address the problem if applicants do not understand the application process, if the form is not structured properly and if questions are poorly constructed. Starting with an “outside in” perspective concerned with understanding how applicants view the application process and think of the information they need to achieve their goal may help address this potential gap. The aim of this thesis is to examine five graduate school application forms from institutions in France to identify trends, potential issues in the use of forms and use this information to make recommendations. Another goal is to understand the users’ application experience to make recommendations. To achieve these goals, a corpus analysis was conducted to identify trends in application forms and potential hindrances. Then, interviews were conducted with students and recent graduates to understand their past application experiences. The interviews were followed by tests with the same individuals to observe how they used application forms, the difficulties they encountered and the good practices they highlighted. The findings from this thesis can contribute to information architecture in many ways. They can help institutions identify information gaps in the application process for graduate studies. They can encourage user experience professionals to consider other dimensions of forms such as the structural patterns of a form. Lastly, addressing issues with forms from the perspective of information design can raise awareness of how better forms design can improve communication between organizations and users, and service delivery.
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Dates et versions

dumas-01814394 , version 1 (13-06-2018)

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  • HAL Id : dumas-01814394 , version 1

Citer

Amanda Belande. Understanding trends and users' experiences with graduate studies application forms in France. Library and information sciences. 2018. ⟨dumas-01814394⟩
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