I’ve just spent a couple of days observing University College London (UCL)’s quarterly IT and digital planning process – Termly Increments or TIs. The experience was inspiring, with colleagues across a wide range of service areas contributing to an approach to setting their priorities that is inclusive, collaborative and transparent.

I had the honour of presenting a keynote at this year’s ContentEd Conference, held in Liverpool. This blog contains a transcript of pretty much what I said, plus links to many of the resources I mentioned.

On 30 April 2024, we hosted an event to showcase the insights we gained from releasing a beta of the new undergraduate programme pages. This post gives a summary of the event, with access to the event slides and recording.

Listening to a podcast by journalist and author Jon Ronson, I was struck by what he had to say about social media echo chambers and feedback loops. It made me think about the parallels between his observations and findings, and how we run user-centred projects. In particular, the importance of working in the open.

From January to May, we collaborated with the Student Immigration Service (SIS) to improve the student experience around applying for visas. In this post, I recap the highlights and outcomes. How we ran the project This was the first project for my newly formed team. Neil and I were committed to introducing new team members […]

It’s done! Our team has delivered a new website for the Fees Service which will greatly improve student fees experience and make life easier for staff. The effort took 8 sprints, was underpinned by robust evidence, and designed with significant collaboration from the Fees and Student Support team.

Our first sprint of the New Year (and of the new decade!) has just wrapped up. A key delivery was the rapid and successful refresh of our undergraduate degree finder content. Read on for a quick overview of the sprint activities and achievements.

We’ve finished our last fortnightly sprint before Christmas. Much of the focus of this, our 4th sprint, was on the existing postgraduate fees experience. It has been a productive two weeks and we’ve managed to uncover a few final parcels of valuable insight before festivities begin! Read on for a quick overview of what we’ve […]

During the early part of December, we ran a series of events to engage with the student recruitment and website management communities. In this post I’ve pulled together slides, video and a write up of what I said.

The new Prospective Student Web Content Team is adopting an Agile approach to delivery, using the Scrum framework. Although this represents a new way of working for many in our team, it’s already a nice fit for our mission. We’re getting on with the job at hand.