E-complaints: A Semi-Structured E-forum at a University

Universities operate in a competitive market and the way a university deals with complaints will significantly contribute to its reputation and performances [1]. The University of Namibia (UNAM) has a complaint system known as a student-lecturer forum, attended in a physical venue. This forum allows UNAM management to respond to students' complaints to improve services on campus. Currently, there is a low student and lecturer turn-up, resulting in a delay in feedback from the forum. Hence a semi-structured e-forum, an alternative to the physical forum was envisioned to accord all students an opportunity to express their complaints. The paper presents the development of the UNAM e-forum aimed to complement the existing physical forum. Furthermore, it presents and analyses results obtained from a usability study that found the developed e-forum easy to learn, efficient to use, easy to remember, has few errors and pleasing to the users based on its overall System Usability Scale (SUS) mean rating of 85.