In preparation for the retirement of the Virtual Visit platform in October 2025, the team ran a project to understand how prospective students orientate themselves with Edinburgh and the campus. I share key findings and how updating programme profiles with Google Maps content can help with orientation.

We’ve distilled our understanding of prospective students into user journey maps so that we can share our insights with the University community. Over the past 3 years, we’ve conducted a great deal of research into the prospective student experience through the work to transform the degree finder and explore the future of open days.

Our prospective undergraduate student journey map is shaped by three high-level phases we identified in the user research we did in the process of designing and delivering the new University degree finders. It’s an at-a-glance summary for student recruitment and marketing colleagues.

Our prospective postgraduate taught student journey map is shaped by three high-level phases we identified in the user research we did in the process of designing and delivering the new University degree finders. It’s an at-a-glance summary for student recruitment and marketing colleagues.

This year, we spoke to 97 people about how they searched for degrees and whether they had used AI tools in the process. I used these insights, along with data from GA4 and results from stress-testing various AI tools, to create a presentation for the 2025 ContentEd conference.

In June 2018, the University of Edinburgh ran a top tasks survey to identify what information prospective students are prioritising when thinking about applying to university. In this post, I’ll talk about the method, why we ran the original survey, the insight we gained from it, and why it’s time to do it again.

We recently reviewed the new undergraduate study website with 19 students, using a summative usability testing approach to produce a performance scorecard. While the new site scored really well, we identified a few areas to improve further.

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

On February 4th, we hosted an open invitation online session to share our insights on flexible study, short courses and the ICL route to a postgraduate qualification. This was of particular relevance to colleagues in related fields, such as Short Courses, Executive Education, Continuing Professional Development, and the part-time intermittent route to a postgraduate award. […]

We’re running an open invite event on Microsoft Teams to share what we learned through staff engagement and user research about the University’s flexible study options. This includes the part-time intermittent (sometimes called ‘Invoiced at Course Level’) route to a postgraduate award and its overlap with other flexible study options. Join us to learn more […]