As we are about to embark on our final round of software development, leading into a launch of the new service from March 2025, I thought this was a good point to look back on what we’ve achieved so far and what’s coming next.

(Much of this is a repeat of the project update I presented at the end of May, so if you prefer watching video to reading, you might want to check out: Project update to the Web Publishers Community (31 May 2024))

What we’re doing and why – quick reminder

I’ve written about this a fair bit already, but appreciate that the project has been running for quite some time.

In a nutshell:

• The current degree finders are at technical end of life and can’t be improved to address the evolving needs of students and of our schools publishing through the system.
• The new approach we’re taking is holistic – it’s not just going to be a like-for-like replacement – and encompasses the whole central provision for prospective students. Hence us talking about ‘the future state for prospective student web’.
• We’ve taken a user-centred approach, checking our assumptions with school marketing and recruitment staff, and critically with students throughout, and evolving our plans as we learn more.
• The rollout of the new provision will happen incrementally through 2025, in line with the usual cycle of degree finder updates for undergraduates and then postgraduates. More on the timeline below.
• What success looks like:
  • Students are able to find what they need, when they need it and self serve successfully. We want to see a reduction in unnecessary enquiries and a reduction in uncompetitive applications.
  • Staff can present more of what they need to from a single central location. We want to see a reduction in web provision for prospective students on school websites.
  • We continue to learn about our audiences and improve our provision on an ongoing basis. Once our current phase of software development with our partners Manifesto ends at Christmas, we will continue to develop the service based on what we know about user needs.

Read more:

• “We are not replacing the Degree Finders. We are transforming them.” – My context setting blog post from January 2022
• All posts about the Future State project

Timeline

The planning and execution of  this project spans 4 years so far.

• 2021
  • Design sprints exploring potential future solutions
  • Business case development (see a presentation summary)
• 2022
  • Project planning
  • Undergraduate student user research discovery
• 2023
  • Undergraduate provision software design and development
  • Beta release
  • Postgraduate student user research discovery
• 2024
  • Spring: Beta appraisal
  • Summer: Software development restarts after EdWeb2-related hiatus
  • Autumn: Phase 3 of software design and development

• 2025
  • Postgraduate Curriculum Transformation software development requirements (unconfirmed at present)
  • March release: website launch for undergraduate 2026 entry
  • October release: website launch for  postgraduate 2026 entry

• 2026 onwards
  • Continuous system improvement

2024 activity

Year 2 of the USG-funded phase of the project was 2023-24.  Practically, due to the delays enforced by the development of EdWeb2 (the University’s new corporate content management system that we build on top of), our work with our development partner Manifesto began again in April.

Beta review

One positive that came from the enforced delay in software development was the opportunity it gave us to release some sample pages developed in collaboration with some of our schools (Chemistry, Literatures Languages and Cultures, and Veterinary Medicine). Three preview pages of future undergraduate degree profiles were publicly available (alongside existing Degree Finder versions) from September 2023 to January 2024.

Through usability testing sessions with prospective students, web analytics and a feedback form we learned a lot about the new design, mostly positive but with a few areas we subsequently gave attention to during our summer 2024 phase of development.

We presented our findings and improvement plans in April, and provided a summary.

What we learned from releasing a beta version of our undergraduate programme pages – Carla Soto’s blog (April 2024)

In summary:

• People found the long single page overwhelming. We redesigned subheadings and text spacing to improve readability
• People found navigating the long page challenging at times: We redesigned the presentation of in-page navigation
• The orientation challenges we saw were most acute in mobile interfaces: We totally overhauled our approach to mobile content presentation
• Feedback ratings on the beta improved from 3.9/5 to 4.3/5 once the improvements were put in place, and student success rates in usability testing also improved.

Software development progress so far in 2024

We restarted software development in late February, working through to the end of July.

During this time we focused on:

• Finalising back-end aspects of the degree profile publishing system​, including usability testing with school-based editors. (Join us for a review of this user research later in October)
• Evolving the interface design, based on the findings from the beta release
• Developing search and listings functionality, looking ahead to late 2025 when all undergraduate and postgraduate degrees will be searchable from the same location.
• Building the postgraduate taught programme page, based on our collaboration with schools from late 2023 and subsequent testing with students. (Read more about the schools collaboration)

Software development to come in 2024

Our final phase of software development with our partners Manifesto is just about to begin, and we’ll be working with them until Christmas.

During this time we will:

• Build the postgraduate research programme template
• Pilot a data feed integration from EUCLID in collaboration with Student Systems
• Finalise search and listing functionality
• Improve the staff editorial experience based on what we learned from testing in the summer
• Ensure we have everything essential in place ready for the service rollout through 2025

User research activity

Throughout software development we have been conducting small batches of usability testing to both help ensure our designs are likely to work with users before we go to the expense of building things, and to check the usability of the software that has been delivered.

In addition, we’ve discovery (early-stage) user research in a number of areas of inform and validate our plans:

• A second round of user research with prospective postgraduate researchers, with a focus on the application and admissions process which was highlighted as the most critical area in need of attention during our initial user research in this area in 2023.
• An investigation of the experience for students following the ‘Invoiced at Course Level’ (ICL) track for postgraduate taught study, as we uncovered significant concern and dissatisfaction among recruitment and marketing colleagues when we ran sessions to co-design the postgraduate taught template. This work has recently begun, with a playback of findings planned for January 2025.

Staff engagement

The service that our team runs is for marketing and recruitment colleagues in schools and colleges in support of their student recruitment work. We have made consultation, co-design and communication of our plans a priority throughout this project going al the way back to our exploratory design sprints in 2022.

During this year we have:

• Engaged postgraduate recruitment colleagues in co-design sessions to draft our first versions of page templates for subsequent testing with students
• Shared what we learned through usability testing and analytics of the beta release (which was co-designed in 2023 with undergraduate recruitment colleagues)
• Tested the editorial experience of the new system with members of the Degree Finder user group, and shared the findings in a collaborative usability testing review
• Convened a panel of stakeholders in the recruitment of students to postgraduate ICL degrees, to help shape our user research brief

Our major area of activity right now is in the training and support of colleagues who contribute to the annual refresh of undergraduate degree profiles. The launch of Undergraduate Entry 2026 degree profiles in March 2025 is our first major launch, with a significant overhaul of how we present website content to prospective students and success here hinges on the ability of these colleagues to successfully engage with the process.

Find out more

If you’ve any questions about our work, and the significant changes that will come throughout 2025, please get in touch.

Neil Allison’s contact details

Read all blog posts about the Future State project

Future state project update October 2024 / Future student online experiences by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0