Replacing the University’s Degree Finders has been long talked about. It’s long overdue. In this post I’ll explain where we’re up to, and why replacing is not a term I prefer to use.

We’re looking for two people with a passion for human-centred content design to join our team. If you’re up for solving big digital problems for prospective student, working in a multidisciplinary team this could be the opportunity for you.

I look back on what we learned by running six design sprints over the spring and summer of 2021, both in terms of shaping the research and design technique to suit our circumstances, and in terms of what this has meant for shaping the future provision for prospective students.

Our design sprints generated an amazing amount of ideas in a short period of time, and most importantly, feedback from students on which ideas were good ones. Our design sprint lead, Nicola Dobiecka, talks through our prototypes and what we learned.

Last week our Design Sprint Facilitator Nicola Dobiecka ran a session on experience mapping to share what we’ve learned about the prospective student decision making process. Session recording and access to the map are available to Edinburgh staff.

It’s a little over a year since we delivered our first user-centred enhancement project and I’ve been looking at analytics to dig deeper into how we’ve influenced website visitor behaviour to reduce unnecessary email enquiries. Analysis shows we influenced over 25% to self serve rather than make an enquiry.

We’re recruiting two positions to our team: a user experience specialist to lead our research and dissemination activities, and a performance analyst to transform our approach to quantitative insight.

Lauren and I have had our session proposal accepted for this year’s ContentEd conference in November. We’re really looking forward to sharing our experiences at the international higher education conference for content professionals, and we’ve got a discount code to share with Edinburgh colleagues.

We have two entry-level opportunities to join our team and start a career in content design. These positions would suit graduates or people with a couple of years’ relevant experience. Applications deadline: 24 August 2021.

Join us on Thursday 8 July at 10am to watch international prospective undergraduates try out a design we’ve prototyped to make it easier to work out whether they might be qualified to study an undergraduate degree at Edinburgh.