Category: Content strategy and design
The theory and practice of everything content strategy – strategic, operational stuff, content and systems design..
..anything that’s relevant inside the content life-cycle – including search, IA, SEO etc. would fall under this category.
This 3-week sprint saw us finalising and testing financial requirements pages, creating content for applying for a visa outside the UK, and planning a new navigational structure.
During the 2-week sprint 4 of our Student Immigration Service project, we developed new Certificate of Acceptance for Studies (CAS) content and tested the changes with University staff. In addition, we started work on new content for student visa financial requirements.
In this sprint, we focused on reducing the number of enquiries to the Student Immigration Service (SIS) by redesigning their enquiry form to include self-service prompt text for students.
A term I hear too often in meetings about digital content is “signposting”. In my view it’s a cop out and it’s incredibly damaging to the student experience. We need to focus on students’ task success instead.
Last November, we worked with Communications and Marketing colleagues to evolve the undergraduate offer holders website. The purpose of this website is to encourage offer holders to accept their offer at the University of Edinburgh
While working with colleagues in schools on the latest degree finder update, I noticed the content sent through to us reflected common mistakes in writing for the web. Here are my tips for creating digital content that is informative, accessible, and that provides the best possible experience for prospective students.
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.
After adding links to school-specific guidance in our content around teaching and learning in 2021-22, we found that prospective students only interacted with content from a handful of schools.
Since the spring, our team has been working with the Enquiry Management Team to update website content to answer the questions prospective students are emailing about.
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.
