Thesis Project: Bridging the Gap to Improve Telkom University’s Website Experience
Published Monday, May 4, 2026—2 minutes read
The university website had been serving people for years, but the question remained whether it was actually meeting the needs of those who depended on it for information.
Have you ever tried to find something important on a university website and felt totally frustrated because it was too slow or confusing? I noticed this problem a few years ago. While deciding on a topic for my master’s thesis, I realized that many people were struggling to use the Telkom University website. I wanted to understand what was going wrong and how it could be improved.
Spotting the Problem
Telkom University had an ambitious goal to become a research and entrepreneurial university by 2023. To support that vision, having a strong digital presence was crucial. However, the university had never conducted a comprehensive evaluation to determine whether its main website actually met users’ expectations. Instead, previous redesign efforts relied primarily on observing, copying, and modifying existing websites rather than conducting proper user research.
I wanted to provide a scientific foundation for a redesign. We needed to find out if there was a gap between what users expected and what they actually experienced. To investigate this, I used WebQual 4.0, a popular website quality measurement tool, and modified it specifically for a university website. This adaptation allowed me to measure the aspects of website quality that mattered most in a university environment.
The Findings
I gathered feedback from 400 participants, including students, lecturers, employees, and members of the public. After collecting all the responses, I analyzed the results to identify the largest gaps between user expectations and their actual experiences. This helped me identify the areas requiring the highest priority.
The results showed that several aspects of the website were falling significantly short of user expectations. The highest-priority areas included :
- Improving the response speed of website pages
- Providing more complete and useful information
- Creating a more attractive website appearance
- Improving overall ease of use
- Making information easier to find
These findings gave the university a clearer picture of where its website experience needed improvement. More importantly, the research showed how a website quality measurement instrument could be adapted to a university context and used to turn broad concerns about the website into measurable priorities. For me, that was the most important outcome of the thesis. Rather than redesigning based on assumptions, we could identify what users actually expected and where the existing experience fell short.