Feedback on our new undergraduate degree finder
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.
In this post
- How we collect feedback: retrospectives, surveys and 121s
- Feedback about the new programme pages
- Feedback on our team
- What we’re doing with your feedback
How we collect feedback: retrospectives, surveys and 121s
As part of each annual degree finder launch, we send out requests for feedback, run a retro to share the good and not-so-good experiences and hopefully learn lessons to take forward to the next update cycle.
Project retrospectives
A retro or retrospective is a chance to stop and reflect on a project, process, or even just a short period of activity. You bring your team together, give them a time-limited space and predefined structure within which to share their thoughts both good and bad, and use this to gather actions to take forward to the next phase or new project.
There are always some snags with a large project, or some part of the process that doesn’t work so well, which is why we always hold a team retro to review the degree finder update cycle as a whole.
We tend to use Miro for our retros, and have sections titled:
- What went well
- What didn’t go well
- What might we do differently
- Actions (What should we do next)
The titles don’t matter so long as you’re providing clear spaces to collect information about each facet of a project and how you might learn from it.
We spend 5 minutes praising the good parts of the project or activity, before spending a little more time reflecting on things that didn’t go so well. Everyone has a chance to explain their points, and after voting on the priority issues, we take some time to think of alternative ways to do things, or steps we could take to mitigate similar issues in future. From this you can build a concrete list of actions you may need to take before the next project phase or activity begins.
Miro’s guide to retrospectives
Our undergraduate 2026 retro gave us a lot of food for thought – some obvious, some less so, and some more high priority than others. We were also able to group these under the headings of guidance, workflow and editor liaison, and systems, which will help direct our efforts going forward. We also ran a separate retro with the Admissions team to discuss their part in the project. We’ll take all these actions into consideration for undergraduate 2027 (and postgraduate 2026, where applicable).
Feedback survey and school editor 121s
Every year, we send around a feedback form to the editors involved in the undergraduate update cycle. Editors can choose to leave anonymous feedback or give their names, and we circulate it for 2 weeks after the go-live. This year’s survey had a few more questions than usual, as it covered the launch of the new programme template too. We had 5 responses from a possible 24, so low, but still giving us something to work with.
Reassuringly, a number of the snags that came up in the feedback for 2026 entry won’t be an issue for 2027 as we transition to the new system. But between this feedback form for School editors, our initial fixes post-go-live, and the discussion in the retro, I knew it was important to dig into a few particular case studies, particularly where there was room for improvement.
For that reason, I offered and held a number of 121 sessions with School editors to discuss the undergraduate update cycle in more depth, particularly what goes on in Schools when they start preparing for the new edition of the degree finder.
I’ve gleaned a number of insights from the sessions I held so far, and will definitely continue to do this in future. Part of the beauty (and challenge!) of the degree finders is that everyone approaches it differently, and on different timelines. The task for me as a provider of the service is to make sure we can provide enough wiggle room to cater for the exceptions, without compromising the consistency of the whole.
Some of the feedback has gone straight into the degree finder backlog (more on this below), while others will take more creative thinking, particularly where they relate to our cross-team collaboration and processes.
Feedback about the new programme pages
We were really pleased with this year’s feedback on the new programme pages from Schools and senior stakeholders around the University.
WOOHOO! Congrats team – this looks great!
Love it! Big team effort and it was great to be involved in this even in the little tiny way we were.
Well done, All! Great to see this launch.
We’ve also had plenty of comments on the new design, particularly given the length of new degree finder entries now we’re not using accordions any more:
I think it looks a lot more modern, easy to navigate with the right hand menu and has a similar style to our competitors.
Looking at other unis we offer a lot more information, this is good and bad. BUT, I think our new layout allows users to return to self serve information they require at different points.
This was one of the most significant changes; more fields, more scope to add content, and crucially, a longer page as we weren’t hiding content away in accordions any more.
This caused some challenges both during the content collection phase of preparing UG 2026 (lots more to collate and review by both Schools and Prospective Student Web) and with the final product (potentially lots more content on individual programme pages). However, the programme pages now meet their intended goal of providing a comprehensive overview of our degrees, and through feedback, testing and refinement we’ll continue to monitor how this is working.
Read more about how Prospective Student Web developed our new undergraduate content provision
Feedback on our team
By far the most heartening feedback to read has been the comments about working with our team:
A great team, as always. Approachable and willing to listen.
Fab team, always open to listening to ideas and trying to find solutions. Really approachable, friendly and innovative team. When I grow up I want to work for the PSW team!
We also received some feedback about where things didn’t quite go so smoothly, or where we still need to work on the best approach to suit all editors and editorial styles.
From a personal standpoint, this is the first year I’ve seen the undergraduate cycle through from end-to-end, and while I think I’ve come a long way with understanding how it all hangs together, there’s still plenty of gaps I want to address. I’m partly tackling this with 121s (more on this below), but if there’s ever anything degree finder you want to discuss, do get in touch with me.
Contact me to talk about the degree finder
We genuinely want to work alongside our key stakeholders and with a project like the degree finders, it is a true team effort. If I emailed you anything about degree finders in the last 18 months, thank you!
What we’re doing with your feedback
Continuous improvement: the degree finder backlog
As I mentioned in my last blog post, there’s never enough time to get everything done, so inevitably some things end up in a backlog. This is no bad thing; while some things weren’t a priority for go-live, these kinds of improvements and changes will make our content provision better, or easier to use. We now just have more space (postgraduate degree finder preparation aside!) to think about the best way to approach them.
Website migration at scale: Lessons from the move to EdWeb 2
At the moment in our backlog we have:
- 7 on-hold items
- 2 new areas for discussion
- 18 active development requests or bug fixes
- 8 items escalated to another team
We’re still thinking about the best way to share this list, but if you’re ever interested in what we’re working on in relation to the degree finders, please get in touch.
What’s next
Usability testing of our new undergraduate degree finder started last week, and I’m particularly keen to hear how the new site and layout performs with real students. We’ll be sharing more information in due course about the outcomes of those sessions, and anything that is going into the backlog based on the research.
We’ll also be putting our technical system to the test in a real sense with postgraduate degree finder editors from May, when they’ll get access to review and edit their programmes in the new content management system. Undergraduate editors will follow in June, and we’ll continue to monitor, discuss, and review any issues that arise once live editing starts.
We’re always interested in hearing feedback: good, bad, neutral and anything inbetween, so we can learn, adjust, and better support our editors and stakeholders. If you’ve noticed anything, are wondering how or why something works in a particular way, or just want to start a conversation, please get in touch with me.
Contact me to talk about the new degree finder or all things content operations
I look forward to hearing from you!
