As part of the future degree finder project, our team has been exploring navigation options. We did some pop-up research to find how students interact with our degree finder content without left hand navigation. We found they used alternative means to get to other content on the site.

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.

Our team has been working to create a content model for the future of prospective undergraduate online provision. In this post, I recap the initial sprints we held to begin to develop the model.

We’re running an online event on Thursday 1 December to share our latest work, give you the chance to feedback and register interest in collaborating on a preview beta release early in 2023. If you’re a contributor to the current online degree finders, or just interested in the prospective student experience, book a place.

I have been supporting the team’s current website content auditing activity by looking at corresponding website analytics. In this post I will share some early insight trends and what I’m seeing in terms of website management behaviour that impacts what we can learn from website analytics.

The team has just completed our audit of a selection of school sites. We’ve uncovered some interesting themes and trends that will help inform the build of a new system to replace the degree finder and better meet the needs of student recruitment colleagues in schools.