We’re running an open invite event on Microsoft Teams to share what we learned through the user research conducted during the summer of 2023. Join us to better understand the experience of prospective postgraduate research students, with the majority focus on PhD.

Provision for prospective postgraduate 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.

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 […]

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.

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.

Last week our Design Sprint Facilitator Nicola Dobiecka ran a session on experience mapping to share what we’ve learned about the prospective student decision making process. Session recording and access to the map are available to Edinburgh staff.

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.

Join us on Wednesday 18 August at 10am to watch prospective postgraduates try out a design we’ve prototyped to make it easier to find scholarships and funding available to them to study at Edinburgh.

Our challenge for design sprints 4 and 5 was around the presentation of entry requirements. It’s such a big area we decided to dedicate two sprints. In sprint 4 we looked at provision for UK applicants (specifically widening access students) and in sprint 5 we looked at how we serve international students.

Join us on Thursday 8 July at 10am to watch international prospective undergraduates try out a design we’ve prototyped to make it easier to work out whether they might be qualified to study an undergraduate degree at Edinburgh.