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.

The team came together on campus during Welcome Week to do some pop-up research with newly arrived students. It was a great way to come together as a team, and for everyone to interact first-hand with the people we’re creating digital services for.

In this post, I recap the experience of conducting online usability testing for our project with the Student Immigration Service (SIS) and share some lessons we learned about the importance of testing before a site goes live.

My team and I recently reviewed our usability testing facilitation skills through a playback of some of our test recordings. In this post, I recap why we ran the session, how we ran it and what we learned.

A term I hear too often in meetings about digital content is “signposting”. In my view it’s a cop out and it’s incredibly damaging to the student experience. We need to focus on students’ task success instead.

Our design sprint challenge was to identify how we might make all funding opportunities findable and comprehensible to prospective students. We designed and tested a prototype concept to help us gauge how useful students find a new scholarship search facility and the presentation of the funding information.

Sprint 3 had us researching and designing potential new features to help prospective students estimate their cost of study. We tested whether students would value being able to calculate their total cost of study, if presented with a breakdown of costs – whether certain, variable or estimated.

Join us on Thursday 27 May at 10am to watch prospective postgraduates try out a design we’ve prototyped to make it easier to work out how much studying a degree might cost.

We ran a design sprint to find out how we could enhance the digital experience for prospective undergraduate students by providing them with tailored content relevant to their fee status and stage in their prospective student journey.

Join us on Thursday 29 April at 10am to watch prospective postgraduates try out a design to customise their information for a future degree finder programme page.