While it’s been disappointing to push back our go live dates for our future state project, our developers have been making best use of the hiatus and we’ve achieved some things that will benefit us in the longer term.

Over the summer, our team audited various University websites with content for prospective postgraduate taught students. We were looking to find areas of content that might benefit being in our new postgraduate degree finder.

We just finished building a replacement tuition fees application which improves processes and makes our colleagues’ lives easier. The most important part for me, though, is the groundwork for future enhancements to the presentation of tuition fees for our replacement degree finders.

Last year we worked with Finance to redevelop their registration form for the payment of tuition fees. As part of that work, we had to find the routes to the form and update the corresponding web content.

Listening to a podcast by journalist and author Jon Ronson, I was struck by what he had to say about social media echo chambers and feedback loops. It made me think about the parallels between his observations and findings, and how we run user-centred projects. In particular, the importance of working in the open.

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.