Undergraduate Open Day pop-up research
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.
Events like these are great opportunities for us to bring the team together and get us closer to our target users.
One of the more onerous aspects of my role is participant recruitment to take part in research. So, when we have 4000+ of our target audience visiting our campus, it’s too good an opportunity to miss.
Pop-up testing is the perfect approach.
What is pop-up research? (an article by Dana Chan explaining the approach in more detail)
Preparation
We spend the week before getting everyone up to speed on what we would be doing on the day. We have different levels of experience doing this kind of research across the team, so this was a chance to offer others to get more experience and confidence to go out and do this kind of research themselves.
As well as agreeing the focus and goals of the tests with various stakeholders, and then designing the test scenarios with the team, I needed to organise a schedule so everyone knew what they were doing when and run a demo session with the team so everyone could get some confidence with the scripts.
What we tested
For our pop-up research activity on campus, there were multiple areas that we wanted to investigate with each one representing an interest of a different part of our team. Over the course of our time on campus we were able to test:
Mature students content requirements – what information is most important to mature students and why?
Process for international clearing – would a new form design improve the experience of international applicants applying for clearing and steer non-eligible applicants away from it?
AI usage of prospective students – how much do prospective students use AI tools to search for information that helps them decide what to study and how to apply to university?
How long it took and participant numbers
Pete and Lauren conducting research with a prospective undergraduate student at the Open Day
Pop-up research is typically a quick way to test and get insight into a specific area you want.
At the Open Day we operated as individuals rather than pairs because there were only five team members available (myself, Neil, Lauren, Heike and Louis). Over the course of 2 hours, we exceeded our recruitment targets:
Mature students content requirements – interviewed 6 participants
Process for international clearing – tested with 16 participants
AI usage of prospective students – interviewed 25 participants
A fantastic result no doubt, exceeding my expectations. I planned for additional time in case progress was slow, but this meant we were able to head off into town for a nice team lunch (all work and no play and all that).
Undoubtedly, the lovely sunny weather helped us. Lots of people were sitting about between open day sessions, just enjoying the weather which made it very easy for us to approach them and ask for a little bit of their time.
But I’d say that weather aside, people at events like this are typically very receptive, so long as you’re not interfering with their schedule.
When the weather isn’t so great (which is a lot of the time in Edinburgh) the abundance of cafes and indoor meeting spaces across the campus are also very productive locations for pop–up user research.
Getting access to real prospective students
At many points in the year, it can be difficult to get access to prospective students. We are fortunate that we have lots of on-programme students available to test with for much of the time, but there is added value in being able to test our ideas with actual prospective students.
This is because they are at the stage in their journey where they are interacting with our services. They can give an opinion on something that they are currently using, and draw on experiences happening right now, whereas our current students will often have to recall what they were doing or thinking up 18 months previously.
Over 4000 students and parents visit the campus during an undergraduate Open Day
We learn quickly about what to do next
In the afternoon we typically run a collaborative playback session on the area we’re testing.
Why we run collaborative usability testing playbacks (blog from me about why playbacks are so important)
As the insight we gathered was predominately from user interviews it didn’t quite fit the collaborative playback approach we normally take, so we spent the afternoon transcribing our interviews (an important step that allows us to identify emerging themes from our research) and logging any usability issues we saw for participants using the international clearance form.
The team now have some great insight to take away from the Open Day that helps them in conversations with stakeholders which will help us improve different aspects of the prospective student journey.
I really enjoyed learning about the usage of AI tools from prospective students and parents and how they feel about them when it comes to looking for information about what to study and how to apply to university.
The content designers in our team have spent a lot of time learning about how these tools work and beginning to think about the impact they might have on how content is designed in the future, so this insight will be really useful.
Is AI changing the way prospective students apply for university? (Flo’s blog on what the team have learnt so far about AI usage)
Interested in pop-up research?
If you’re a colleague in the University and are interested in trying this approach out for yourself, feel free to drop me a line, and I’d be happy to chat through your approach.
