I recently did some content improvement work with the Postgraduate Recruitment team that taught me a lot about the use of standout elements and how they influence user behaviour.

Is detailed programme information important to prospective students? Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yes, and analytics and user research show us the marketing value of making this information accessible online.

As part of the future degree finder project, we recently ran a series of collaboration workshops with colleagues from across the University. These workshops helped us identify any potential issues and refine our prototype for the future postgraduate taught programme page.

While it’s been disappointing to push back our go live dates for our future state project, our developers have been making best use of the hiatus and we’ve achieved some things that will benefit us in the longer term.

It was a pleasure to be able to support the Service Design in Government conference once again; connecting the organisers with University of Edinburgh students keen to network and learn more about the discipline. It’s been a positive experience all round.

After 5 months of hard work and collaboration across the University, we launched the new undergraduate study website for 2021 on 24 February 2020.

In January we ran two open-invite sessions to collaboratively review some of the usability testing videos we recorded during November’s Postgraduate Open Day. Nearly 70 colleagues joined us to agree the biggest issues facing prospective students as they tried to establish their cost of study online.

We’ve been conducting lots of user research interviews recently. We transcribe our interview recordings to more accurately reflect what people said but this comes with an overhead. We’ve been trying automated transcription tools to reduce the effort and speed up our work.

Just a quick follow-up to highlight an important step in the GatherContent process and to introduce a new and useful feature.

Following on from our recent training session on GatherContent for everyone involved in the update of the Undergraduate Degree Finder,  we’ve now updated our guidance wiki and distributed logins to everyone involved.