Join us in January to watch prospective postgraduate students navigating the University website to find key information, and then prioritise the biggest issues we need to fix first.

Open Day testing fees and funding content

In November, our team went out to do some guerrilla usability testing with prospective students who were visiting the University’s Postgraduate Open Days.

What is and how to conduct guerrilla testing (Website and Communications blog post)

Our goal was to learn how easy or difficult it is for students to find and understand postgraduate fees and funding content on the University website.

Doing guerrilla usability research at the postgraduate open day (Gayle’s blog post on our testing)

All together, our team conducted tests with over 40 prospective students. At our playback session, we will showcase a selection of the videos we recorded.

What we’ll do

In the session, we will:

• provide some background about the testing and the techniques we will use in the session (15 minutes)
• watch 4 short videos on the fee finding experience (40 minutes)
• work together to pick out the biggest issues we see in the videos (20 minutes)
• use a quick workshop technique to give us a single master list of the most critical things we need to fix (30 to 45 minutes)

The session will take no more than 2 hours.

Write-ups of previous sessions

Neil and I have been running sessions like this for a long time, along with colleagues back in (our old team) Website and Communications.

These write-ups include what attendees thought of the sessions:

• Postgraduate applicant experiences usability testing showcase session
• Usability testing to understand how staff use Learn
• Helping Helpline help our students – usability testing showcase session

…we found [the session] incredibly useful. Watching a fresh pair of eyes attempting to carry out key tasks really shines a light on the stumbling blocks.

Lesley Middlemass, Digitial Marketing Officer, Communications and Marketing (previous session feedback)

Why you should attend

Directly observing users is one of the most valuable activities you can do to help you meet the needs of your users.

Go and see – principles in practice at the postgraduate open day (Neil’s blog post about why we do this)

Not only will you learn more about the work the Prospective Student Web Content team is up to, you will also take away easy-to-repeat usability testing techniques you can use to improve your digital content.

A low cost approach to collecting qualitative feedback with a list of actions at the end. What is not to love? Should be used as standard for anyone serious about giving their users what they need.

Russell Bartlett, Head of Market Insight, Communications and Marketing

Book your place

We’ll be running 2 sessions focusing on students finding fees content for you to choose from:

Tuesday 14 January 9:30am-11:30am

G.02 (The Pod), Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI)

Book a place for 14 January

Thursday 30 January 9:30am-11:30am

G.02 (The Pod), Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation (ECCI)

Book a place for 30 January

Help us prioritise fixes to the fees online experience / Future student online experiences by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0