I had the honour of presenting a keynote at this year’s ContentEd Conference, held in Liverpool. This blog contains a transcript of pretty much what I said, plus links to many of the resources I mentioned.

As we are about to embark on our final round of software development, leading into a launch of the new service from March 2025, I thought this was a good point to look back on what we’ve achieved so far and what’s coming next.

In the behavioural economics book Nudge there’s a beautifully simple example illustrating the importance of feedback. It’s a great way to explain why it’s so important for content designers to actively engage in hypothesising, prototyping and testing with users. 

The annual web content-themed conference for higher education professionals is happening in Liverpool this year, from 8 to 9 October. Lauren and I are contributing sessions, and we’re looking forward to a couple of days of learning and networking with colleagues across the sector.

Yesterday I had the chance to provide an update about our project to deliver a new website for prospective students, at the University’s Web Publishers Community. Slides and video are available.

Last week we hosted the second unconference organised by UKEducamp. Some of the team have been part of the organising committee throughout, and most of us took part on the day. We all took something from this fantastic volunteer-led free event and recommend more higher education digital colleagues get involved.

UK EduCamp is a volunteer-run organisation who run unconferences to bring together digital professionals in higher education. We’re hosting the upcoming event on Friday 12 January. It’s free and open to book a place.

I gave a presentation recently at the Communications and Marketing department all-staff meeting, in which I shared some of our team working practices. We use regularly scheduled sessions to ensure good communication and support within the team, and to ensure we deliver a steady stream of updates to our stakeholders across the University.

We’re running an open invite event on Microsoft Teams to share what we learned through the user research conducted during the summer of 2023. Join us to better understand the experience of prospective postgraduate research students, with the majority focus on PhD.

Last week we launched a preview of what undergraduate degree profiles will look like when the new system goes live. We call this a beta.