Last week our Design Sprint Facilitator Nicola Dobiecka ran a session on experience mapping to share what we’ve learned about the prospective student decision making process. Session recording and access to the map are available to Edinburgh staff.

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.

I’m looking ahead to the replacement of our current undergraduate and postgraduate degree finders. Defining what we need to support student recruitment in 2022 and beyond is tricky. In this post I explain how I believe design sprints will deliver this.

We’re using an iterative, human-centred design approach to promote UniBuddy in a way that’s responsive to the needs of prospective students.

It’s just over six months since our collaboration with the Fees Service delivered an overhaul to how they present their services online. Yesterday we had our second quarterly check-in with them and learned how trends in enquiries have significantly improved.

On 29th September 2020 Aaron and I presented at the Web Publishers Community session to present the case study of our work in supporting this year’s undergraduate Clearing process.

We worked to support our Admissions Service colleagues by developing a new web interface to display degree programmes in clearing, following agile principles and a user-centred process.

At this month’s meet up of web publishing professionals from across the University, Gayle and Aaron will present a case study of our work to support this year’s undergraduate admissions clearing process.

We followed a human-centred, collaborative approach to meet the needs of the business and applicants for this summer’s Clearing campaign.

Following the changes we made to tuition fee content we conducted a round of usability testing to determine whether students’ needs around fees and cost of study had been met. In general, most tasks tested were completed with relative ease however several issues were highlighted that need addressing to improve the user experience further.