IS428 AY2019-20T2 Assign PARBAT SHREYAS

Overview

Background

Every two years, SMU Libraries conduct a comprehensive survey in which faculty, students and staff have the opportunity to rate various aspects of SMU library's services. The survey provides SMU libraries with input to help enhance existing services and to anticipate emerging needs of SMU faculty, students and staff.

Objectives

The past reports are mainly made-up of pages of tables, which are very difficult to comprehend. In view of this, the objective is to apply appropriate data visualisation to transform these tables into a visual representation that allow SMU libraries to gain useful insights.

The objective to use visual analytics approach to reveal the level of services provided by SMU libraries as perceived by:

• Undergraduate students
• Postgraduate students
• Faculty
• Staff

Data Summarisation

The 2018 library survey dataset has 2639 responses and 88 variables. The survey contains 26 metrics on which the library wants respondents to rate them.

• I01 - I26 indicates the rating given by respondents on the importance of each metric to them.
• P01 - P26 indicates the rating given by respondents on the performance of the library in each metric.
• P27 indicates the overall performance rating given by the responder.
• NA01 - NA26 is not of use to us.
• The remaining questions are used to judge the behaviour and preferences of each responder.
• Finally, there is a comment section wherein the responder can elaborate on anything if they wish to.

Data Preparation

Screenshot	Description
	After importing the raw dataset into Tableau, hide columns NA01 - NA26 as they are of no use.
	Select all I, P and NPS columns and pivot it so that all metrics are specified as rows. Rename Pivot Field Names and Pivot Field Values to Metric and Score respectively.
	It would be helpful to have the description of each Metric. So, we inner join the SMU dataset with the Legends dataset based on Metric = Code to get the Item column, which we can rename to Description. Hide irrelevant columns.
	Give aliases to Campus, Position and Study Area columns as shown to improve understanding.
	Create groups as shown in the screenshots
	Create a sheet called Likert Base, and create the calculated fields shown in the screenshot.

Tableau Story

Link to story.

Overview

Demographics

• Undergraduates make up the highest number of responders, which can be attributed to the fact they are the largest group present in SMU. On the other end, Faculty members make up the smallest group of responders.
• When looking at demographics by study area, Business school affiliates make up the highest proportion of responders, with Law students at the other end.

Overall Satisfaction

The majority (47.2%) of responders gave a satisfaction score of 6 out of 7, with the average being 5.72, which suggests that the SMU population is quite happy with the library and its services overall.

Net Promoter Score

Here, we see that the SMU population is quite likely to recommend the library services to other potential users, with promoters making up 44.1% of the total users (here, a promoter is one who gave a score of 9 or 10 out of 10 to the question How likely are you to recommend the library service to other students?).

Undergraduate

How unique is the library?

• This picture shows the 5 most important metrics according to undergraduate responders. All of these metrics are related to the study spaces in the library.
• The metrics related to the library's services like its online database and search engine rank lower than these in terms of importance, suggesting that most undergrad students use the library primarily for its study spaces.
• This suggests that SMU should invest primarily in improving the study spaces in the library, and only then focus on other services.

Being able to find a place for group work implies satisfactoriness

• All undergraduate students except exchange students gave lowest scores to the I can find a place to work in a group when I need to metric. This metric also ranks in the top 10 in terms of importance.
• When we look at each subgroup, we can see that the lower this metric's average score is, the lower that subgroup's score is for overall satisfactoriness.
• The lowest overall satisfactoriness is seen for Year 2 (5.58), which also gave the metric the lowest score on average (4.52).
• All of this suggests that undergraduate students want to have more group study options in SMU libraries.
• This is also validated in the real world as after 2018, new groups study booths were created and added to the facility booking system, ensuring that groups of students are able to book the booths for given periods of time without hogging it the whole day.

Postgraduate

Law library could improve it's printing services

• Postgraduate students, especially Accountancy and Law students, are heavy users of the printing service. This is evident as the Printing ... needs are met metric ranks in the top 5 important metrics for all areas of study and ranks 3rd when aggregate is taken.
• Most postgraduate students are quite happy with the printing service.
• However, law students are very unhappy with the printing service provided by the library, with an average performance score of 3.89
• Since law students are heavy users of the KGC Law Library, it is clear that the law library's printing facilities are lacking and could use drastic improvements.

Postgraduate students are least likely to promote the library

• Of all the groups considered, postgraduate students are the least likely to recommend the library and its services to other potential users.
• This can be inferred from the fact that 57.05% of postgrad students gave a rating of 8 or lower on the likelihood of promotion question.
• This is especially true for Law students, who also gave one of the lowest scores on the overall satisfaction metric on average. This can possibly be attributed to the printing issue discussed above.

Faculty

Library spaces vs services

• Looking at the importance scores on the left, we can see that the top 10 metrics according to faculty are those related to online resources and other services such as book availability and helpfulness of the library staff.
• This is very different from undergrad and postgrad responders, who mainly used the library for its spaces, and could be attributed to the fact that faculty members usually need access to information from online databases and peer-reviewed journals much more than other groups for their research and module content.
• This suggests that SMU should tune its online services primarily to the needs of the faculty while optimising study spaces for other groups.

Satisfaction levels are high

• The overall satisfaction level is highest for faculty members on average (6.10) than any other group.
• Given that faculty members care most about online services provided by the library, this suggests that the library has a robust set of online services and is successfully able to meet the needs of many faculty members.
• The library should thus focus on improving study services and keep online services secondary since improving those will only lead to marginal returns.

Staff

What do staff members care about as compared to what users care about?

• The topmost important metrics according to staff members comprise mainly of human service-related metrics such as Library staff provide accurate answers to my queries and Face to face enquiries need my needs.
• This shows a stark difference from what users of the library actually care about (i.e. library spaces for students and library online services for faculty).
• This also suggests a mental model mismatch and suggests that staff members might be prioritising improving their performance in their respective roles rather than thinking about ways to actually serve the needs of the library's users or improving functions that are most important to the users.