A new website centred on students’ needs around fees and cost of study went live today. The project was led by the Prospective Student Web Content Team, in close collaboration with the Fees Service in Scholarships and Student Funding.

View the new Tuition Fees website

Website changes and new guidance

Enhancing student experiences means delivery in a number of related areas:

• The new Tuition Fees site, distinct from the Service’s parent business unit Scholarships and Student Funding
• Changes to central webpages (the ‘Study’ theme websites) and the existing Scholarships and Student Funding website which previously hosted fees information
• Enhancements to University website search engine results (from next week)
• Guidance and support to schools-based web publishers to optimise their content, enhance prospective student experiences and reduce CMA compliance risks (from next week)

We’ve put URL redirects in place, so our improvements won’t result in any broken links. However, we are advising all University sites be reviewed and updated in line with the forthcoming guidance.

Cam Edwards, Senior Content Designer

Key features

The new Tuition Fees website has been built in collaboration with the Fees Service, and designed around extensive ongoing user research with prospective students and colleagues who service them.

The website is significantly more useful and usable, prioritising key student tasks:

• Homepage and navigation prioritise the most common tasks for most students
• Tables of fees are all searchable, and were shown to be significantly easier to use in usability tests
• Tuition fee policy content is written for greater clarity, and broken up by audience
• Enquiry channeling encourages greater self-service and ensures the right information is captured to facilitate faster enquiry resolution

Continuous improvement

This is the first example of a new web publishing model being pioneered by the Prospective Student Web Content Team.

We will continue to appraise the success of students using the site, and work with the Fees Service to improve further as we reduce unnecessary enquiries and increase student satisfaction.

Our senior Content Designer Cam Edwards has written a post about why this is going to improve the fees experience for students.

How we delivered the Tuition Fees website project (blog by Cam Edwards)

Changes to school and programme websites required

In the next few days we’ll be getting in contact directly with the lead publishers of all college and school websites to ask them to bring their fees-related content up to date.

Our audit of fees content at college, school and subject area level revealed a wide range of quality and accuracy. This must be addressed.

Updated web pages across the University will help us all take greatest benefit from this project:

• Ensuring the maximum number of students are empowered to self-serve easily
• Directing all relevant enquiries away from school staff and to the Fees Service team
• Reducing content management overheads for school-based web publishers
• Removing CMA compliance risks associated with inaccurate and out-of-date content

Learn more about this project

We’ve been blogging throughout this project, on the range of activities we’ve been engaged in.

Read more blog posts about tuition fees-related website enhancements

New Tuition Fees website – meeting key student needs on cost of study  / Future student online experiences by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0