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CodeforAustralia / school-finder

:eyes: Find schools by location
https://education.nsw.gov.au/school-finder
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Some people don't like "Need more info? Try Google" #319

Closed Rustuma closed 7 years ago

Rustuma commented 7 years ago

image

Two people have now reported this as too flippant and ask that we change the "Try Google" to something else. I know it's a sample of only two - but one is a senior director of schools. Any ideas? @Lilith-Palmer @techieshark

Lilith-Palmer commented 7 years ago

I think the question here is - Where else can school information be retrieved from? The tool directs users to google maps, the school website, the acara website, a page of the department's website (re special learning needs), and my child. The answer is nowhere - if we can't replace this field with something useful, we should remove it.

Rustuma commented 7 years ago

That was the first suggestion given to me. The other was to change "Try Google" to something a bit friendlier, "Here's more on Google"

techieshark commented 7 years ago

That's unfortunate that people found it flippant - I'm sure we were just going for short, to the point, useful. A few thoughts follow.

  1. There's often so much you can learn just by googling things, and I'd hope we could encourage people to try that. In my experience, this is the obvious technique for learning things that people often do not think of -- and I assume this is more generally true which is why sites like LMGTFY were created.

Sidenote, here's an interesting thing you might know if you search for a certain arts school name in Google news (I did not see this news before today):

image

  1. Other than helping people find things, and thinking about @Lilith-Palmer's comment, one potential reason to have that on there is because we might assume there are things people are looking for that either a) we don't show and/or b) might be difficult to find when you first land on any school's webpage but a search might find quickly. In my experience, googling a thing is the fastest way to find specifics, rather than searching any given website.

For example, look at finding "school finder".

The result I want is the second: image

The result I want is apparently not here:

image

Result is not here either: image : maybe it will be later? Still, a specific google search takes me right there.

  1. The other reason it might be useful to direct people to a search is if we could use what they're searching for to inform changes in what info is provided directly by the tool. Imagine if instead of linking to Google we had a search bar, and we could get a summary of top things people searched for. I wonder if Schools dept already does anything like that?
techieshark commented 7 years ago

The short answer though is +1 for trying the language "Here's more on Google", and maybe sending Google Analytics an event that just tells us "anonymous user looked for more info on Google", so we can tell if anyone even uses it -- and if they don't, do as @Lilith-Palmer suggests and get rid of it.

Rustuma commented 7 years ago

Can we add "Here's more on Google"? I'm keen to get the change made plus @reekypete has put in a pull request to deal with #318