As part of the rollout of our new degree finders, we’ve been delivering tailored training to our undergraduate and postgraduate editors. We’ve learnt a lot about training and our editorial users along the way, and have compiled some of our own tips for running training sessions.
On 11 and 12 June 2025 I was again an event team volunteer at UX Scotland, an in-person conference held at the University’s John McIntyre Conference Centre. In this post, I share my key takeaways from the event.
Our team went on campus during the recent Undergraduate Open Day to do some pop-up research and check some design concepts with prospective students and their parents.
I attended GovCamp Scotland last week, an unconference that brought together people in the public sector interested in building better services for people. It was a really positive experience with lots of discussion of challenges we face regardless of the organisations we work for. I left with new perspectives, new connections and a new reading […]
We’re hosting a half-day unconference on Thursday 26 June. This will be a great opportunity for colleagues with an interest in digital aspects of student recruitment to come together for discussion, learning and networking.
At the end of 2024, one of our third-party listing sites, FindAMasters, approached us about taking part in a pilot looking into seeing if an AI-assisted process could complete its ‘brief’ (creating third-party programme listings) using information from our postgraduate degree finder. We thought this was a useful opportunity to put some AI to a […]
Last year, we carried out usability testing around the proposed search and filter interface for the future degree finder. We also tested the effectiveness of updated navigation features to help users orientate themselves on programme pages. We were pleased to see students encounter no major usability issues when interacting with these.
Not all of us have the luxury of working within a team to improve web content. In this blog post I share how I went about a solo project to improve web content. I also reflect on the tools I used and the lessons learned.
Since the end of 2024, we’ve held team sessions to experiment with using GenAI to edit content. We’ve found it to be unreliable and more time-consuming than manually editing content, so we’re not going to use it to help with degree finder editing in the near future.
Our team has been experimenting with AI over the past few months. As part of this, we recently held a head-to-head test between an old technology (Excel) and a new one (ELM, our in-house large language model) for a time-consuming activity we do annually for UCAS summaries. Spoiler: Excel won, demonstrating its usefulness for fixed […]
