Assessing a Student Legislative Website Through Practical Research

Have you ever visited a student organization website and wondered why it feels completely disconnected from what students actually need? While serving in the students legislative council at Telkom University, I noticed a frustrating issue. Even though our website was supposed to be the main hub for sharing legislative news and organizational updates, we weren’t using it effectively. This wasn’t a lecture assignment or a mandatory class project. I simply wanted to understand what was going wrong and how research could help improve it. Later, I turned the study into a paper for a general audience to share the research journey.

Spotting the Problem

Student organizations have broad responsibilities, ranging from supervision and legislation to budget management and gathering student aspirations. To make these functions work, active student involvement is essential. Naturally, publication activities serve as the primary bridge between the council and the student body. However, our website was failing to reach its full potential as an information channel. We relied heavily on social media live reports, but the core web portal remained underutilized and misaligned with student expectations.

To get clear answers, I decided to conduct a structured evaluation using established research methodologies. Since standard website evaluation tools are typically built for corporate e-commerce platforms, I adapted the popular WebQual 4.0 instrument to fit a student organization portal. This customization involved removing irrelevant indicators related to financial transactions and online shopping, leaving eighteen targeted questions across usability, information quality, and service interaction quality.

To gather reliable data, I distributed questionnaires to 120 students from various faculties at Telkom University. The responses were then analyzed using the suitability level method and Importance-Performance Analysis via statistical software to map out user perceptions against their actual expectations.

The Findings

The analysis identified several areas where the website needed immediate attention. Based on the evaluation, improving the platform requires focusing on several key priorities :

• Enhancing security measures to ensure users feel their personal information is safe
• Providing clear and accessible communication channels to connect students directly with the legislative council
• Refining the overall visual design and information layout to match user expectations

These findings gave us a clearer picture of where the website was falling short of its role as a communication channel. More importantly, they turned a general feeling that the website was underperforming into specific areas that could be discussed and addressed. The evaluation therefore became more than an assessment of the existing platform. It gave us a practical basis for deciding what could be improved, while also showing how a research instrument could be adapted to evaluate a website outside the context for which it was originally designed.

Past the Evaluation

The findings were later discussed internally with several relevant members of the council, and we tried to make the adjustments that were realistically possible. Since the website was hosted on a server managed by the university, our ability to customize it was largely limited to the features available through its WordPress setup. Even with those constraints, having an evaluation to guide the changes was certainly better than leaving the website without any evaluation or adjustment at all.

The study also became a useful opportunity for me to work directly with an adapted WebQual 4.0 instrument in a non-e-commerce context. That experience later became relevant when I proposed a master’s research project on further modifying WebQual 4.0 for a much more complex environment, namely the main Telkom University website. In that sense, the study did more than evaluate one website. It also gave me a practical foundation for exploring how website evaluation methods could be adapted to different contexts.

There was still a much broader area that this study did not attempt to investigate. With more time and resources, it would have been interesting to examine how DPM Kema Tel-U could improve the effectiveness and reach of its communication and student aspiration channels across the university. The question would extend beyond what could be improved on the website itself and toward how its website and social media channels could work together to reach more students and support the council’s responsibilities at a higher level.