Our first sprint of the New Year (and of the new decade!) has just wrapped up. A key delivery was the rapid and successful refresh of our undergraduate degree finder content.

Read on for a quick overview of the sprint activities and achievements.

Previous sprints – a recap

At the end of 2019 our last sprint saw the team deepen our understanding of the postgraduate fees journey – while we also orchestrated several successful staff events and playbacks through December and January.

Our final sprint of 2019 – understanding the postgraduate fees journey

We were also hard at work laying out a new approach to the way we collaborate with colleagues and update our undergraduate degree finder content. This involved laying out effective comms and training to establish and test our new GatherContent content operations solution.

Sprint 5 activities and achievements

A new approach for UG degree finder content

The key activity through our opening sprint of 2020 – our fifth sprint cycle – has seen us put that GatherContent solution to use. And it’s been a fantastic success.

After working carefully to establish the new framework and process for the management of degree finder content, the team were able to move rapidly. Over 460 programmes were updated in three weeks.

This is a substantial increase on the velocity of previous years, while colleagues in marketing and across the schools were able to effectively liaise with each other through a simple and optimised workflow.

Editing GatherContent – a follow-up

Colleagues across marketing and schools were able to effectively liaise with each other through a simple and optimised workflow.

Usability playback sessions

Many of you also joined us in two packed sessions through January to examine how prospective postgraduate students navigate the University website. We ran a collaborative, sense making activity and were able to align on many of the big issues students face when seeking the information they need.

Researching the PGT fees experience

We also completed several tickets against our building user research epic for the PGT fees experience. This sets us up very nicely for what comes next. Some of these tickets involved:

• Interviewing staff about their experiences of providing services to prospective students
• Mapping the major pain-points from that service perspective
• Comparing relative demand for content across fees sites
• Identifying the history, context and use of the tuition fees search
• Examining prevalent patterns of the postgraduate and undergraduate sections of Scholarships and Student Funding site

Discovery through staff interviews – pinpointing the pain

What’s next?

With this and other evidence at hand, our future sprints will begin to explore the potential solutions to the big PGT fees problems identified.

We’ll be working with our colleagues to that end. And we’ll be moving quickly, introducing the most valuable, important changes from sprint to sprint.

Have any questions?

That’s me off for now. Until the next sprint!

If you’ve any questions please drop a comment and I’ll get right back. I’d love to hear your feedback.

Remember, you can get involved and sign up to our mailing list or email us directly.

Prospective Student Web Content team mailing list and contact details

As ever, your input is very much welcome and we always consider your comments and feedback.

Sprint 5 review: The New Year sees in a degree finder refresh / Future student online experiences by blogadmin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 3.0