How we overhauled our web content for unsuccessful applicants
We audited web content for unsuccessful applicants on college sites, streamlined and redrafted it with admissions staff, and brought it onto our central study sites. The finished pages improve the user experience and reduce the need for unsuccessful applicants to seek feedback and request appeals.
Project background
How the University rejects applicants
Every year, our admissions staff consider thousands of applications. For 2024 entry, we received 66,293 undergraduate applications and made offers to 31,132 candidates – leaving 35,161 with a rejection.
Admissions staff categorise unsuccessful applications using three-letter rejection codes. As an example, the code RRQ stands for ‘Research proposal below required quality’ and generates the following one-line rejection reason: ‘We regret we are unable to offer you a place on this programme as the quality of your research proposal is below what we would require’.
Unsuccessful applicants receive these rejection notifications through UCAS (undergraduates) or the Applicant Hub (postgraduates).
Example rejection for a research degree, giving the reason: ‘We regret we are unable to offer you a place on this programme as the quality of your research proposal is below what we would require.’
Detailed, personalised feedback is not given by default. If an applicant wants feedback they must get in contact, usually through the Enquiry Management Team (EMT); EMT reroutes these enquiries to the relevant admissions staff who must consider and respond to each individually.
In 2024, EMT staff received over 3,600 emails on the topic of feedback or reconsideration – a huge workload for everyone involved.
Web guidance for unsuccessful applicants
Written guides detailing common reasons for unsuccessful applications have existed within the University web estate for years. Each college has had an unsuccessful applications area of the website, with subpages for common rejection reasons.
The old unsuccessful applications landing page for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, linking to individual pages describing common rejection reasons, including ‘You are not qualified for entry’.
These webpages should have been invaluable for rejected candidates, offering a much clearer idea of why they were unsuccessful and reducing the need to request personalised feedback.
While the pages did contain some helpful guidance, there were several issues:
- The pages were scattered across the college sites rather than centralised in one location, and typically hidden in the navigation, making them hard to find.
- Content was duplicated across the colleges, contributing to a poor search experience.
- Most importantly, much of the content was hard to read, out of date and inaccurate.
Even if applicants did come across these pages, it was unlikely they would find what they needed.
Project goals
The primary aim of this project was to move existing unsuccessful applicant content from college sites to the applying sections of our undergraduate and postgraduate study sites.
The decision to do this came out of the broad audit our team completed as part of preparatory work for the new undergraduate and postgraduate study sites (you can read about the outcomes of this audit in my blog about creating a content model schema).
Creating a content model schema for our future degree finder
We planned to copyedit, rationalise and restructure the pages as part of this move, so that we could:
- leave applicants with a better understanding of why their application was unsuccessful
- reduce enquiries from unsuccessful applicants
- channel the enquiries we receive more effectively
What we did
Step 1: Audited existing pages
We began work in March 2025 with an audit of the existing pages. This meant:
- creating a spreadsheet and listing every page on the college sites related to unsuccessful applications
- taking a screenshot of each page and adding it to our project board in Miro
- marking up each screenshot to highlight duplicated content, typos and readability issues
- organising our findings within the spreadsheet
I’ve already touched on some of the issues we encountered with this content, but one of the most notable was that, for postgraduates in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, information was contained in an inaccessible, 10-year-old PDF.
Step 2: Talked to stakeholders and subject matter experts
As we carried out the audit, we realised there were gaps in our knowledge when it came to the rejection process.
To learn more, we contacted various colleagues who are responsible for stages of this process:
- admissions staff, who decide on rejections and issue the rejection codes
- Student Systems, who manage the EUCLID messaging that contains the rejection
- EMT, who handle enquiries about feedback and reconsideration
This helped us establish a more holistic understanding of how the rejection process works and where the pain points lie for applicants.
These conversations also reinforced what we already suspected: that these pages were not being properly utilised. EMT had no awareness the pages existed, and not all colleges were in the habit of linking to them when providing feedback.
Step 3: Designed a new information architecture (IA) for the pages
With the audit complete, we started designing a new IA for the pages.
Rather than creating separate pages for the three colleges, we would merge similar rejection reasons across all three, and create college-specific reasons individually under relevant headings on the main landing pages.
To illustrate the new IA we built mock-ups of the landing pages in EdWeb 2.
A mock-up of the undergraduate landing page. Generic reasons relevant to all colleges sit at the top of the page; college-specific reasons sit under headings.
Step 4: Sent our recommendations to admissions staff to approve
We wrote up our recommendations for the new IA and shared these with admissions staff.
While all staff gave their approval, some advised that there were additional reasons we could add for the postgraduate site; these staff provided rejection data for the most recent admissions cycle to show the most commonly used rejection codes.
Step 5: Drafted new pages and held content crits
With our new IA approved by admissions staff, we started redrafting.
We had to be mindful that the ‘generic’ rejection reasons referred to all three colleges, and therefore – where relevant – would require clarifications in the text, usually under college-specific sub-headings.
Example draft for the rejection reason ‘Applied after the deadline’, where we added broad, cross-college guidance under the heading ‘General UCAS deadline’, and specific guidance for medicine and veterinary medicine applicants under a separate heading.
As we wrote the drafts, we looked at the rejection data sent to us by admissions staff and made the decision to create some new pages, including one specifically for postgraduate applicants from China (the University sets specific entry requirements for this group, and unfortunately they are not always met, leading to numerous rejections).
Once we had finished drafting, we held content crit sessions, made final changes, and prepared the drafts to share with admissions staff.
Using content crits to help redevelop the undergraduate study site
Step 6: Reviewed content with admissions staff
To get final sign-off, we scheduled Teams meetings with admissions staff and went through each webpage draft one by one.
The majority of content was approved within these sessions, however we came away with some specific areas to redraft and the requirement for two additional rejection reasons for the postgraduate site.
After some final back and forth over email, admissions staff were happy with the drafts and gave us the OK to publish.
Step 7: Built and published new pages in study sites
We built the new pages in the undergraduate and postgraduate study sites, in both cases within the ‘After you apply’ section, a subsection of Applying.
As we prepared to publish, we liaised with the site publishers for the existing pages, asking them to unpublish (once ours had gone live) and set up redirects to the new pages.
Challenges we faced during this project
As with any project, there were some significant challenges:
- Admissions staff are incredibly busy year-round, and it was difficult to find times to review content with them.
- The rejection process is compartmentalised across different teams around the University, and it’s difficult to get a holistic view of the applicant experience.
- Different teams work in different ways. Each college we worked with had their own structure and approach to rejecting applicants, which meant there were key differences that we had to consider when planning and represent in the content.
- Key information came midway through the project, most notably, the rejection data from the most recent admissions cycle. Had we requested this earlier in the process, we could have used it when planning the new page structure, instead of retroactively finding ways to slot new reasons into the existing IA.
Despite these challenges, we delivered on time, launching the new pages on 7 October 2025 when our new postgraduate study site and degree finder went live.
You can view the new pages at the undergraduate and postgraduate study sites:
Unsuccessful applicants (undergraduate study)
Unsuccessful applicants (postgraduate study)
What we will do next
Now that the new webpages are live within our centralised study sites, our content operations team will take over maintenance of the pages, ensuring they are updated every year (or whenever a request for a change comes through from relevant admissions staff).
We will also monitor visits to these pages and how site users engage with the content through GA4.
