Continuing our work to help the Careers Service make their website more user-centred, the UX Service ran a session to map the stages a PhD student typically goes through when they interact with the Careers Service, to help us work out the role of web content at different stages of the flow.

At the start of the year, prompted by the migration of their website to the new publishing platform EdWeb 2, the Careers Service team contacted the UX Service for help improving and re-designing their website.

After several conversations with the team in which we learned about their website and their aspirations for it, and shared details of UX approaches and possible methods, we formulated a plan to work together, which we kicked off with a workshop in January.

The workshop was held as part of a Careers Service away-day, providing the opportunity to engage the wider Careers Service team in the area of content strategy, to help them embrace the importance of improving the website and to recognise the potential to make it better.

The goals of the workshop were to:

• Define the audiences of the Careers Service website and their associated goals
• Identify information that the Careers Service wish to publicise on their website
• Prioritise areas of the site for improvement to meet both the Careers Service needs (‘business needs’) and the needs of its audiences (‘user needs’)

Read more about the workshop in a blog post by Nick Daniels:

Working with the Careers Service on their content strategy

The workshop helped to convince the Careers Service team of the value of user-centred methods and approaches, and as a result, following the session, the team sought to take steps to learn more about the users of their website. They made the most of opportunities to hear from students who interacted with their services, for example at pop-up stands in the Main Library and other engagement events in the Careers Service calendar.

We identified more ways the UX Service could support the Careers Service

The Careers Service initiated a series of sprints to work through to make improvements to their website, which began with rigorous auditing of pages, analysis of site structure and menu links and assessment of site content. For a site containing around 700 pages, this was a lengthy process and the Careers Service team recognised the benefit in weeding out non-visited and duplicated content to make their site more manageable for their team.

Keen to support their longer-term goal of improving their website, and recognising an opportunity to help them prioritise content and webpages to focus on, the UX Service came up with several ideas for sessions we could facilitate with the Careers Service team. These included the following:

• A user mapping session to pinpoint the ways PhD students typically interacted with the Careers Service
• A sketching workshop to reveal student expectations of a Careers Service homepage
• A digital-sustainability-focused initiative to gauge the environmental impact of the Careers Service website and to consider ways to reduce this

Read more about ways to align content management and digital sustainability in my blog post:

Digital housekeeping: Applying content management practices to improve digital sustainability

This blog post describes the user mapping session which resulted in changing the Careers Service website to better serve PhD students.

PhD students are a key audience of the Careers Service

As part of their wider analysis of those using their services, the Careers Service team had identified several audiences that they wanted to try to serve better. PhD students were one such audience. The Careers Service offers several events aimed at PhD students and the team had recognised that PhD students sought specific careers help, however, they were unsure of the best way to use the website to publicise the help on offer and to reach PhD students in looking for careers-related support.

Mapping aimed to visually align PhD students’ needs with the service offering

When building a map of an experience, it can be tempting to reach for a nice-looking map template and shape content to fit, but this can have less value than a more organic approach. Starting with a blank canvas and experimenting with the placement and arrangement of data sources available can be a better way – to let order emerge and in the process identify gaps, areas of congruence and incongruence.

Adopting this more fluid technique to mapping for our work with the Careers Service team, we defined our goal for the session: To create a visual representation for the journey a PhD student takes when interacting with the Careers Service.

The scope of the map was: Starting where the person identifies they need careers-related help, and ending where the Careers Service has helped them (and the student is clear on the steps to take, and they have the necessary knowledge and confidence to proceed).

Resources we found useful in planning the mapping session

• Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Customer Alignment Through Journeys, Blueprints and Diagrams – a book by Jim Kalbach
• How to Create a Customer Journey Map (video by Megan Grocki at UX Mastery on YouTube)

Before mapping could start, we needed to collect data

To ensure we were prepared for the mapping session, the Careers Service team were tasked with gathering some information.

The Careers team pooled information about PhD students’ needs

As facilitators of the mapping exercise, the UX team were keen to ensure the Careers Service staff – who had interacted with many PhD students and had a first-hand understanding of their needs – had the opportunity to contribute their experience-gained knowledge to the map. Therefore, ahead of the session we asked the Careers Service team to think about the following:

• What questions do PhD students bring to the Careers Service (either in-person or sent online)?
• What information and support do these students typically ask for?
• What problems do these students seek to resolve/ask for help with?

The information they supplied provided a useful set of user needs to start placing on a map.

Typical questions PhD students had/problems they wanted to solve included the following:

• How to pursue an academic career
• What to do after my PhD
• How to use my PhD outside academia
• How to talk about their PhD outside Higher Education
• How to know if a PhD was right for them
• How to network and build confidence
• How to achieve a work/life balance
• How to find mentors
• How to find part-time work/internships

Information/support they sought:

• Funding and grant resources
• Details of conferences to attend
• Guidance on writing an academic CV
• Entrepreneurship advice
• Help with mental health and wellbeing – e.g. overcoming imposter syndrome
• Advice on personal branding
• How to optimise LinkedIn presence.

The team identified content for PhD students on the Careers Service website

The aim of the mapping session was to visualise how PhD students needs were met by the Careers Service, so it was important to identify pages and sections of the Careers Service website that had been produced with PhD students in mind. The Careers Service team did a thorough job of analysing the content for these students, taking screen shots of existing content on their site (and content linked from pages within their site) and also creating visual pathways of the routes PhD students could take through the Careers Service site to get to the relevant pages.

Screenshot of a whiteboard showing screenshots of webpages containing content aimed at PhD students and the pathways they take to find the content

Mapping the collected data helped establish what PhD students need and when

Using the pre-defined scope of the map, the UX team began the session by creating a whiteboard frame divided into three sections:

1. Start of PhD (first year)
2. PhD initiated (mid-way through)
3. Near the end of PhD (later years)

These sections served as useful reference points as the UX team began the session by asking the Careers Service staff about the best placement of the student needs they had identified. Through this process, a map emerged which provided insights like:

• When PhD students came to the Careers Service website, they didn’t see anything for them (as they did not class themselves as ‘Graduates’ or ‘Students’ which were the options presented by the site)
• At the start of their PhD, students needed to choose between an academic or non-academic career pathway so they sought to understand the differences between the two routes
• As they progressed through their PhD, they sometimes sought to switch to a non-academic pathway, to secure a job in industry or to avoid the competition for academic roles
• If they were experiencing difficulties, they sought a one-to-one consultation to help them
• Their needs shifted to practical such as CV and interview preparation towards the end of their PhD

Building layers onto the map and adding in the content that supported the changing needs of students, it was clear to see that there was more online content to support some stages than others. Furthermore, in addition to the online help, there were recurring opportunities for in-person help or advice as well as events and conferences. Through conversations with the Careers Service team, the UX team helped identify instances where web content was needed and where it was not as useful in meeting student needs.

The session closed with a simple map, with coloured notes to denote stages of the student journey, decision points, typical student actions, categories of online content, and types of in-person help available. The process had helped surface:

• There was web content which could be useful to PhD students (for example mental health and wellbeing resources, personal development information) but this was not specifically aimed at them so could be difficult to find
• There were instances when an in-person consultation was preferable and self-serve web content inadequate (for example when making career-influencing decisions)
• There were events like conferences and career planning sessions that could be highlighted to PhD students at the start of their journey, to provide them with an overview to help them plan ahead
• There was online content available in other sources – like handbooks and blogs – that could meet PhD student needs at different stages, therefore alleviating the need for web content to cover this.

An online whiteboard showing a map showing the needs of PhD students throughout their interaction with the Careers Service and how these needs can be met.

Analysing other university websites provided ideas for pathways for PhD students

The Careers Service team had found the mapping process useful and to move forward they were keen to look at ways they could change the web content on the existing careers site. John Wilson from the UX team carried out some competitor analysis of other university websites, to pool ideas for ways of presenting web content aimed at PhD students. This work showed:

• Universities with a clear path through their site for PhD students and those without one
• Trends in terminology used to describe PhD students (for example, Researchers, Doctoral students
• Headings for sections of content for PhD students (for example ‘Careers in academia’, ‘Careers outside academia’, ‘Post-PhD career options’).

The Careers Service site re-design includes clearer placement of PhD student content

Between July and August 2025, the Careers team worked closely with the EdWeb 2 team to implement initial changes to their site based on the user-centred work they had completed. These changes involved archiving dis-used pages, removing duplicate content and re-designing sections. For PhD student content, a new top-level menu link was created, in order to place PhD students more prominently on the homepage, to provide a clearer route to the relevant web content.

Screenshot of two versions of the Careers Service website, the top one showing the old page (with sections for Graduates and Students) and the bottom showing the new menu with a new section for PhD students.