The annual web content-themed conference for higher education professionals is happening in Manchester this year, from 16 to 17 October. Lauren and I are contributing sessions, and the team are looking forward to a couple of days of learning and networking with colleagues across the sector.

Our team went on campus during the recent Undergraduate Open Day to do some pop-up research and check some design concepts and live services with prospective students and their parents.

As part of the future degree finder project, our team has been exploring navigation options. We wanted to learn how students would interact with our degree finder content without left hand navigation. We found removing this navigation had no impact on their ability to use the site and they used alternative means to get to […]

Provision for prospective posgraduate research (PGR) students is largely devolved to schools, which makes it challenging to work out what is useful to publish in the centrally-managed Study section of the website. We’re undertaking discovery phase user research to better understand what students are doing and what might enhance their experience.

We have concluded that it’s not going to be feasible to release our new service for prospective students as planned next year, due to our dependency on the Web Publishing Platform which is not yet ready to roll out.

We’ll use an extended slot at this week’s Web Publishers Community to update on our progress so far this year, covering: timelines, content design and collaboration, user research and usability testing.

In our work to create a content model for the future of undergraduate degree provision, we had to find a way to visually present the model information from an initial spreadsheet. Here’s how I created this visualisation, our content model schema, and how we presented it to the University community at an event last December.

I have done research on the usage of subject area pages on the current degree finder, which shows that users spend a short amount of time on these pages looking for a link to the programme entries and don’t engage with any other content. Due to this, we are moving this subject area specific content […]

We ran an online session for marketing and student recruitment colleagues on Thursday 1 December, to share an update on our work, invite questions and comments and promote an opportunity for collaboration and co-design in the new year.

We recently completed exploratory user research into the prospective undergraduate experience of applying to the University of Edinburgh. In this post, I share insights of an emerging theme – why prospective students want more information about what they can study.