Provision for prospective posgraduate research (PGR) students is largely devolved to schools, which makes it challenging to work out what is useful to publish in the centrally-managed Study section of the website. We’re undertaking discovery phase user research to better understand what students are doing and what might enhance their experience.

We have concluded that it’s not going to be feasible to release our new service for prospective students as planned next year, due to our dependency on the Web Publishing Platform which is not yet ready to roll out.

We’ll use an extended slot at this week’s Web Publishers Community to update on our progress so far this year, covering: timelines, content design and collaboration, user research and usability testing.

We ran an online session for marketing and student recruitment colleagues on Thursday 1 December, to share an update on our work, invite questions and comments and promote an opportunity for collaboration and co-design in the new year.

We’re running an online event on Thursday 1 December to share our latest work, give you the chance to feedback and register interest in collaborating on a preview beta release early in 2023. If you’re a contributor to the current online degree finders, or just interested in the prospective student experience, book a place.

We’ve had a fabulous couple of days at this year’s Content Ed conference, with three members of the team contributing sessions and our user-centred approach winning top prize in this category.

We’re currently recruiting for a senior content designer who will lead our content operations function and play a key role in shaping our future service as we build a new content management system.

At a recent awayday, I had the opportunity to share some thoughts on services, what that means for how our team does its work and how it might have wider impact.

This week I presented to over 100 colleagues from across the University on our plans for the transformation of online provision for prospective students. This post summarises the key points, or you can review the slides and video of my presentation if you want the full detail.

We’ve spent the early part of 2022 working on a plan to replace the central University provision for prospective students. A big part of this offering is the degree finders. Join us for a talk about this planning work and what we envisage the next 3 years will bring.