THE AVION
B4 Technology
Campus Groups: Engaging Experience? Jessyca, Pitch, and William are students in the Research in User eXperience (RUX) Lab in the Department of Human Factors and Behavioral Neurobiogy RUX investigates the usability and user experience of technology in our everyday world. This is a regular column that explores different technologies typically used by Embry-Riddle students.
The CampusGroups Homepage
Jessyca Derby & William Shelstad Graduate Researchers Weerachet “Pitch” Sinlapanuntakul Undergraduate Researcher Being a part of student organizations is a part of campus life. College students join clubs that they are interested in and bond with students that have similar interests. These student organizations want to reach out to as many students as possible and to engage with the campus at large. Student organizations usually have some social media or online presence like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and even Discord to advertise themselves. Embry-Riddle provides organizations a way to engage with students through CampusGroups in both website and mobile applications. CampusGroups is a platform that organizations, departments, and students can use to join groups, communicate, and adver-
tise events. Students can join organizations they are interested in and receive updates about club events. CampusGroups was implemented during the Fall 2019 semester and replaced Connections. But what do students and organization leaders think about CampusGroups, and how do they use it? To answer this question, the RUX lab conducted interviews with five campus leaders as well as an SGA student employee.
An SGA Perspective Abrielle Otero- Student Program & Usability Intern in SGA- handles troubleshooting, feature selection, and the organization of CampusGroups as a whole, and is the “go-to” girl for any questions students have about CampusGroups. According to her, CampusGroups has two primary uses: to help club leaders manage their organizations and to help students join organizations on campus.
The desktop version of the website helps club leaders since it has a host of features. Among them are an email builder that can send out email reminders at a specific time, a social media-like feed (for your organization as well as SGA, and Embry-Riddle in general), information about volunteering opportunities, survey creation, a public website for your organization, budget packets, dues collection, information about funding, and much more. The app, however, is more useful to members of the organization, as it doesn’t include all of the same features as the website and was created around receiving notifications, looking at feeds, and finding out information about student organizations. Even though CampusGroups includes lots of features - many of them are underutilized. As Abrielle explained, “the feeds would be really cool, especially when we [SGA] want feedback, but people don’t
Image Courtesy/Jessyca Derby
really use that.” She also mentioned that many organizations are not using the website feature, which allows club leaders to create an organization website that people who may not have a CampusGroups account, like incoming students or parents, can view. Some features work great, such as the budgeting section of the website. However, Abrielle admitted that some of the features of the site could be finicky. We wanted to learn what works well and what doesn’t, according to club leaders.
Club Leaders’ Perspective We asked several club leaders about the reasons they started using CampusGroups. We found out that the reasons they started using it were to manage the budget, communicate with club members through built-in emails, and to post CONTINUED ON B5 >>