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.

Our work this year to deliver a new website for prospective students has reduced the number of pages we publish by over 50%. This is better for the student experience, better for the environment and better for our content management overhead.

In the lead-up to opening applications for 2025 entry to undergraduate programmes through UCAS clearing, we collaborated with colleagues in Student Recruitment and Admissions (Admissions Operations) to make improvements to the web content and forms that applicants use to apply for clearing places via our website. Initial insights during the clearing period suggest that our […]

In June 2018, the University of Edinburgh ran a top tasks survey to identify what information prospective students are prioritising when thinking about applying to university. In this post, I’ll talk about the method, why we ran the original survey, the insight we gained from it, and why it’s time to do it again.

We recently reviewed the new undergraduate study website with 19 students, using a summative usability testing approach to produce a performance scorecard. While the new site scored really well, we identified a few areas to improve further.

Last year, we carried out usability testing around the proposed search and filter interface for the future degree finder. We also tested the effectiveness of updated navigation features to help users orientate themselves on programme pages. We were pleased to see students encounter no major usability issues when interacting with these.

Not all of us have the luxury of working within a team to improve web content. In this blog post I share how I went about a solo project to improve web content. I also reflect on the tools I used and the lessons learned.