Improving student understanding of postgraduate funding and UK government loans: a Content Operations mini-project
This blog is the introduction (and conclusion!) to a short series about a mini-project the Content Operations team completed in August and September 2024. Following some established stages of content design, we worked on a short project to provide clearer information on UK government loans for postgraduate study and postgraduate funding in general.
This short series details the approaches we took, what we found out about content design along the way, how we met (or didn’t meet!) our goals, and what we plan to do next on this topic.
For more information on a particular stage, see our individual blogs:
- Defining the scope: Background, research and user needs
- Right information, right place: Channel mapping and content drafting
- Lessons learned from usability testing under time pressure
We hope that by sharing our process from start to finish, you’ll find something useful, whatever stage of content design you are at. While an end-to-end approach was helpful for this project where we started with a ‘new’ area of content, sometimes even just one or two stages can offer useful insights into how to improve or iterate your content.
About the project
In the run-up to the launch of the 2025 postgraduate degree finder, the Content Operations team completed a mini content design project in conjunction with our colleagues in Student Recruitment and Admissions.
Our main brief was to provide:
Clearer, more consistent and visible information on postgraduate loans for UK students.
However, as with a lot of content design projects, this was just one small piece of a larger ongoing goal to clarify for prospective students:
How can I pay for postgraduate study at Edinburgh?
Read more about the project background, research and user needs
Our method
In Content Operations, we don’t usually work on larger scale content design tasks end-to-end. Therefore, we decided to tackle this as a mini content design project, going through all relevant stages, to give us some more experience in this area.
After seeking some advice from other content designers in the wider Prospective Student Web Team, we aimed to follow Content Design London’s process, which offers a handy overview of the different stages your content project might follow.
Read Content Design London’s overview of the content design process
I say ‘aimed’ because in some instances, you may not need (or have time or resources!) to do all of the steps.
In our case, we were dealing with a subject where we already had some information, but not everything. We therefore followed most of the steps in order, skipping over stage 4 as the University’s language and tone of voice largely shaped our approach there:
- Research
- User needs
- Channel and journey mapping
- Language and emotion
- Creation
- Sharing
- Iteration
What we learned
Of all these steps, stage 6 was probably the most beneficial, fluid, and recurrent theme of our work. We shared snippets with key stakeholders, project partners, and our peers in the Prospective Student Web Team in short chunks and frequently so that we could get as much feedback as possible before going live.
As we shared our findings frequently, by the end of the project we felt relatively confident that we hadn’t progressed things in the wrong direction and that any outliers could come to the surface. As it turned out, we didn’t catch everything, but that’s why we have the iteration step.
Project outcomes
We launched the new content and information architecture under Postgraduate funding on 30 September, just before the launch of the postgraduate 2025 degree finder content.
It has so far been well-received, although like anything new we almost immediately had to go in to tweak a couple of areas in response to live feedback – a lesson in no project ever being ‘complete’! We had some very positive feedback from our colleague in SRA who initiated the project with us, and are keen to continue the working relationship.
Next steps
A Content Operations team’s work is never done, and we have further post-live activities on the to-do list already. We want to do more testing, address other sources of loans, and look at other content we can expand on to improve prospective students’ understanding of the full cost of study.
Complete more testing
Our first round of testing was very localised. We initially reached out to some new members of the team who, hadn’t had any interactions with these sections of the site before. However, as they were still team members, we’d like to test with people further away from the project for a more unbiased view. We also didn’t get to test all the scenarios in detail; it’s therefore possible we’ve overlooked some sticking points in the journey for other user circumstances.
Other international loans content
We started with UK government postgraduate loans, but we know there are equivalents for other countries and governments. Our colleague in Student Recruitment and Admissions is already working up some research on other equivalent loan providers, and we’ve scheduled another kick-off session for December to look at fitting another round of work in.
Improvements to other funding information
We’re keen to keep looking at the holistic picture of postgraduate funding. While loans form one part of the picture, now this section has been worked up we’d like to revisit other areas that we might want to improve so prospective students can work out a funding model that suits them.
There were some areas we didn’t get to expand on as much as we liked:
- Improving our specific information on part-time study so students can gauge how much time they will have to work alongside their studies
- Exploring the funding experience for online students with colleagues in Online Learning
- Working with Scholarships on their side of the content
We’re looking forward to exploring some of these next stages in future work – watch this space!
