As I mark nearly one year with the Prospective Student Web team, I’m excited to reflect on my experience as a Web Content Support Assistant, imparting some of my highlights and key learnings from the last 10 months.

I’ve been looking at future work in recent months while the team have focused on rolling out our new service. We still have a lot of improvements to bring to the prospective student online experience, and we want student recruitment marketing and admissions colleagues to help us prioritise what we do next.

As part of the rollout of our new degree finders, we’ve been delivering tailored training to our undergraduate and postgraduate editors. We’ve learnt a lot about training and our editorial users along the way, and have compiled some of our own tips for running training sessions.

Our team went on campus during the recent Undergraduate Open Day to do some pop-up research and check some design concepts with prospective students and their parents.

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.

Since the end of 2024, we’ve held team sessions to experiment with using GenAI to edit content. We’ve found it to be unreliable and more time-consuming than manually editing content, so we’re not going to use it to help with degree finder editing in the near future.

During recent usability testing with students, we discovered that some participants had used AI when applying for university. To learn more, I researched how site users are engaging with GenAI tools, and how these tools are currently presenting our web content. The results left me with some questions about how our team should be futureproofing for […]

In advance of getting access to the new degree finder content management system (CMS), this blog provides School editors with a preview of editing an undergraduate programme page, including what the programme template looks like, what you can edit, what you can’t edit, and where you can find more detailed guidance.

We’re now a month past our undergraduate degree finder launch. We’ve had a great combination of positive and constructive feedback, allowing us to better understand the specific challenges editors face collating undergraduate information, and develop our backlog of improvements to the degree finder service.

With the launch of the latest edition of the undergraduate degree finder, the Prospective Student Web team has also launched the new degree finder CMS (content management system). This blog compares the new CMS to the methods we have used to date for our collaborative editing process, highlighting some of the new features that will […]