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Future student online experiences

Future student online experiences

Sharing the work of the Prospective Student Web Team

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 […]

During recent usability testing with students, we discovered that some participants had used AI when applying for university. To learn more, I researched how site users are engaging with GenAI tools, and how these tools are currently presenting our web content. The results left me with some questions about how our team should be futureproofing for […]

In advance of getting access to the new degree finder content management system (CMS), this blog provides School editors with a preview of editing an undergraduate programme page, including what the programme template looks like, what you can edit, what you can’t edit, and where you can find more detailed guidance.

We’re now a month past our undergraduate degree finder launch. We’ve had a great combination of positive and constructive feedback, allowing us to better understand the specific challenges editors face collating undergraduate information, and develop our backlog of improvements to the degree finder service.

In the run-up to launching our new undergraduate and postgraduate degree finder service throughout 2025, we also had to contend with a migration to a new corporate content management system (CMS) in late 2024. While this additional task was challenging, I learned a lot from my role coordinating the move with both central and devolved […]

With the launch of the latest edition of the undergraduate degree finder, the Prospective Student Web team has also launched the new degree finder CMS (content management system). This blog compares the new CMS to the methods we have used to date for our collaborative editing process, highlighting some of the new features that will […]

Four years ago, the content designers in our team got started on our project to transform our online provision for prospective students. With the recent launch of the new undergraduate provision, we summarise and reflect on the journey that got us to this point.

Alongside launching a new undergraduate degree finder, we’ve redeveloped and launched an updated undergraduate study site. I recap our process to create the site.

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