In 2025, the University of Edinburgh ran a new top task survey, having last run one in 2018. Improvements we made to the survey this time have resulted in our most confident understanding of what tasks are most important to prospective students thinking about applying to university. I’ll explore what these tasks are and how […]

We’re in the middle of a project to make it easier for prospective students to understand the likely cost of studying and living in Edinburgh. Over February, we did a variety of discovery activities to learn more about prospective student needs, how other institutions approach content on this topic and what the law requires us […]

In 2025, we discovered that AI tools like ChatGPT were not able to “read” the entry requirements on our 2026 undergraduate degree finder and often returned incorrect information. Inspired by the University of Dundee, we implemented a solution, which – according to my latest testing – has successfully boosted the accuracy of results.

We did some housekeeping at the end of last year to audit and rationalise the files in our SharePoint document library. We’ve now come up with a new structure and approach for how we store and maintain project and team artefacts.

Over the last year, we launched our revamped undergraduate and postgraduate degree finders, complete with a host of new, user-friendly features in the content management system (CMS) for editors and administrators to utilise in the backend. One of these features is a built-in comments function, which allows users to interact with one another by leaving […]

Our students are increasingly reliant on paid work to help fund their studies. It’s no surprise then that prospective students are keen to understand their study commitments so they can gauge their likely capacity for paid work while at university. School editors can meet this need in the Degree Finder.

In preparation for the retirement of the Virtual Visit platform in October 2025, the team ran a project to understand how prospective students orientate themselves with Edinburgh and the campus. I share key findings and how updating programme profiles with Google Maps content can help with orientation.

Back in April, I carried out some discovery work into the postgraduate applying process. We wanted to find out what it’s like to use the EUCLID application form and whether the guidance content we provide on the study site reflects and supports this experience.

Our new postgraduate study site brings together content that was spread across our web estate into one location. This involved working with multiple teams to deduplicate and consolidate content, reducing our page count by 60%.

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.