We’re running an open invite event on Microsoft Teams on Tuesday 12 March to share our latest insight from user research as part of the project developing the new postgraduate taught (on-campus and online) programme page.

Over the summer we undertook user research with prospective research students to better understand their experiences and help inform the design of our future web presence. We presented findings last week to the student recruitment and marketing community, and the slides and video are now available to staff.

We’re running an open invite event on Microsoft Teams to share what we learned through the user research conducted during the summer of 2023. Join us to better understand the experience of prospective postgraduate research students, with the majority focus on PhD.

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 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.

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.

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.

Our design sprint challenge was to identify how we might make all funding opportunities findable and comprehensible to prospective students. We designed and tested a prototype concept to help us gauge how useful students find a new scholarship search facility and the presentation of the funding information.

Join us on Wednesday 18 August at 10am to watch prospective postgraduates try out a design we’ve prototyped to make it easier to find scholarships and funding available to them to study at Edinburgh.

Our challenge for design sprints 4 and 5 was around the presentation of entry requirements. It’s such a big area we decided to dedicate two sprints. In sprint 4 we looked at provision for UK applicants (specifically widening access students) and in sprint 5 we looked at how we serve international students.