Redeveloping the undergraduate study site
Alongside launching a new undergraduate degree finder, we’ve redeveloped and launched an updated undergraduate study site. I recap our process to create the site.
Why we redeveloped the site
When designing the new undergraduate programme profile, we incorporated many new content areas into programme pages themselves. For instance, schools now can explain more about student life in our ‘Life at Edinburgh’ section, and our Career paths section has dedicated spaces for graduate profiles and information about our Careers Service.
By having these new sections in the degree finder, schools can provide more detailed and tailored information about these areas in relation to each degree programme. This replaces the need for providing generic information about these topics in our central study site.
As such, our primary goal with redeveloping the site was to remove content areas that are now covered in undergraduate programme pages.
We also had two undergraduate study sites, one for the upcoming entry year (the ‘subsite’) and one for the year after (the ‘main site’). This set-up resulted in a lot of duplication of content we wanted to tackle by having only one site.
Starting with a content audit
Our first step in redeveloping the site was to conduct a content audit of the undergraduate main site and subsite. In addition to identifying crossover with content on the new programme pages and duplication between the sites, we audited to:
- identify content we could remove because of low page views, value or duplication
- develop a new information architecture (or structure) for the site
- help develop ideas for how to structure new pages of content
Through the audit, we found that it was easy to deal with the duplication between the main and subsite. There was relatively little unique information on the subsite, and it was easy enough to amend the main site content to account for different information for two entry years.
We also identified which pages we could remove due to crossover with the new degree finder pages, but analytics helped us make more evidence-based decisions around this. For instance, while we expected to get rid of most of our student life content, we found some pages in the section were the most viewed in the site. So we’ve decided to keep this content on the site for now and monitor usage post-launch.
We audited over 320 pages and ended up with a working information architecture that was 192 pages.
Part of our working structure for the undergraduate site following the audit.
Testing our initial ideas at the Undergraduate Open Day
Shortly after our content audit, the University held an Open Day for prospective undergrads. We used this opportunity to test out some content ideas we got from the audit with our target users.
We tested:
- whether students could more easily navigate our entry requirements section broken down into country-based sections or if all qualifications broken up by country on a single page worked better
- whether our funding content on a single page could be better navigated with accordions for each country/region or no accordions with just the heading/text directly on the page
What we found was students could easily find the content they needed with either option, so we ended up sticking with our original structure for entry requirements content and not using accordions for funding content.
Redeveloping the site content
During the audit, we created a list of actions for each page we audited. This included suggestions for how to redevelop those pages based on an evaluation of the readability of the content and noticing anything that was out-of-date.
These actions became the starting point for redeveloping the site pages we knew we were going to keep, but needed to rewrite and update.
Other pieces of content required more work based on our proposed changes to the site information architecture. For example, one area of duplicate content we noted in the site audit was our fees and funding section, which was organised by country/region and then by task. Where fees or funding info was the same or similar for each country/region, we found the same content repeated in multiple sections.
To reduce the duplication and number of pages for this section, we came up with a new task-based structure for fees and funding content. This meant drafting entirely new content for the section centred on the task (for example, ‘find funding opportunities’) and only mentioning country/region-specific info where needed.
Holding content crits in the team
For any content that was entirely rewritten or had significant changes, we put these pages through a content crit. This involved all the content designers getting together to review the content and comment on it.
We did this by adding a copy of our drafts to a Miro board and getting on a call together. At the start of each call, we gave a summary of the changes we made and anything we were looking to get feedback on. Then we read the content in Miro and added stickies to it with comments.
We follow the rose, thorn, bud method for content crits which involves writing:
- positive comments (roses)
- constructive comments (thorns)
- suggestions of opportunities to make the content better (buds)
Read about our crit process in more detail in Nicole’s blog post
The crits gave us a list of actions for how to improve the content we drafted. Once we made the discussed changes, we were ready to share the content with subject matter experts.
Meeting with subject matter experts
For most content areas in the site, we took the approach of drafting content before meeting with subject matter experts. This is because in most cases we were working with existing content, so it made more sense to meet with subject matters experts after drafting to ask them any questions we had and make sure all our content was up to date and accurate.
The main exception to this was content in the entry requirements and applying sections of the undergraduate site. These pages require significant input from our colleagues in SRA Admissions. This year, their team needed to prioritise getting content ready for our new design of entry requirements in the undergraduate degree finder. Because of that, they had limited resource to dedicate to redeveloping undergraduate site content.
So instead, we focused on rewriting the pages we assessed as high priority to update during the audit. This mainly meant pages that had both high page views and significant readability issues we wanted to address.
We didn’t redraft any of the other pages in the entry requirements and applying sections. For the time being, Admissions colleagues looked through them to make sure everything was up to date. We will come back to updating the rest of the content at a later point.
For the pages we did work on, we held a series of workshop sessions with Admissions. These were a mix of content crits and pair writing/reviewing content together.
For example, we would start by reading over the existing content for a page we were working on and make comments about what was hard to understand or looked incorrect. This informed an action list for us to create an initial redraft of the content. After redrafting individually, we’d come back together with Admissions to review the new draft and make any changes we discussed and agreed on.
Comments on one of our existing webpages in a workshop with Admissions colleagues.
Building the site
After agreeing final drafts with subject matter experts, we started to build the new content in our new study site in our content management system.
We used Monday.com as our project management tool to divide up the site build between team members and track our progress. Along the way we discovered some bugs and were lucky to have Aaron, our software developer, on hand to fix any issues as we developed the site.
Once we built pages, we peer-reviewed each other’s work as a final check for formatting or editorial errors before launch.
What’s next
We have a backlog of testing and research ideas to continually improve the site.
We prioritised testing and research prior to site launch on top tasks for prospective undergrads in relation to degree programme profiles. Now with both the new undergraduate degree finder and study site launched, we will dedicate some time to testing the study site, including checking our navigation and labelling choices.
See the new site
If you’re interested in checking out the redeveloped site, it’s now live.
View the new undergraduate study site
To see pages we made significant changes to, we recommend checking out:
