FSU ITS houses a variety of services in its online catalog, including user experience. The purpose of ITS user experience is to represent the voice of students, faculty and staff. User opinions are important because they provide feedback on a broad range of FSU topics. 

Kathy Wilkes, assistant director of User Experience for ITS, has recently collaborated with Florida State’s Sustainable Campus in order to conduct a card sorting project. For this collaboration, Wilkes was tasked with finding the successes and downsides of the Sustainable Campus website. A class of 30 students worked with Wilkes to see which of the categories on the Sustainable Campus website were easily understood and which needed some tweaking. It was found that 72.1% worked while 27.9% need to go through a redevelopment process.  

Along with the card sorting project, Wilkes assisted with the Voice of Community (VOC) project which took place in 2019. The VOC interviewed various FSU populations to gauge people’s perceptions of ITS and what changes ITS should implement in the future. One of the changes people wanted to see was a faster track to receive IT help. Excitingly, ITS was able to execute this plan by creating the ITProPass, which allows IT professionals to skip  basic troubleshooting and receive customized help faster. The creation of the ITProPass shows how user experience works in a real-life setting. 

Kathy Wilkes reflects how projects like the VOC help “build partnerships with outside communities” and understand the expectations of technology used throughout FSU so ITS can better serve the university.