Our team has been working to transform a list of proposed content components into a visual prototype of the new undergraduate degree finder. Along the way, we’ve collaborated with schools to get a better insight into their content requirements.

Provision for prospective posgraduate research (PGR) students is largely devolved to schools, which makes it challenging to work out what is useful to publish in the centrally-managed Study section of the website. We’re undertaking discovery phase user research to better understand what students are doing and what might enhance their experience.

We have concluded that it’s not going to be feasible to release our new service for prospective students as planned next year, due to our dependency on the Web Publishing Platform which is not yet ready to roll out.

We’ll use an extended slot at this week’s Web Publishers Community to update on our progress so far this year, covering: timelines, content design and collaboration, user research and usability testing.

In our work to create a content model for the future of undergraduate degree provision, we had to find a way to visually present the model information from an initial spreadsheet. Here’s how I created this visualisation, our content model schema, and how we presented it to the University community at an event last December.

Over summer 2022, we worked with the Finance team to improve content on how students pay tuition fees. From August to October 2021 to the same period in 2022, the team saw a 75% drop in enquiries in the content area we were focusing on.

We ran an online session for marketing and student recruitment colleagues on Thursday 1 December, to share an update on our work, invite questions and comments and promote an opportunity for collaboration and co-design in the new year.

Our team has been working to create a content model for the future of prospective undergraduate online provision. In this post, I recap the initial sprints we held to begin to develop the model.

We’re running an online event on Thursday 1 December to share our latest work, give you the chance to feedback and register interest in collaborating on a preview beta release early in 2023. If you’re a contributor to the current online degree finders, or just interested in the prospective student experience, book a place.

In this post, I recap the experience of conducting online usability testing for our project with the Student Immigration Service (SIS) and share some lessons we learned about the importance of testing before a site goes live.