The Role of Profiles project aims to identify recommendations for an improved online profile provision, based on the needs of University staff. Interviewing individual staff members was our primary research method. This post outlines how we set up and conducted staff interviews – to hear what staff had to say, and to gather data on pre-identified areas of interest.

All University of Edinburgh staff are able to create profiles and then add, edit and delete profile content within a dedicated profiles section of the University web estate, established in an earlier version of the University web publishing platform, EdWeb.

The Role of Profiles project began in January 2025 to research what staff need and expect from an online profiles provision, with a view to making recommendations for an updated provision to be more aligned with both staff aspirations for their profiles and their working practices to publish, edit and manage their profile content. A mix of quantitative and qualitative methods set out to understand the way profiles are used currently, and to identify areas for improvement. Working iteratively, each research activity was continually shaped and defined based on data and insights previously gathered.

Read about our research approach in the blog post: The Role of Profiles: our new project researching needs and potential for online profiles

View the existing profile provision on the University website: University Profile pages

Read more about the Role of Profiles on the project website: The Role of Profiles: WPS 021

Interviewing was the chosen method to gain individual perspectives

Each University staff profile is unique to the individual, therefore to investigate staff needs and requirements for profiles, it was necessary to hear from the staff owning the profiles themselves. Interviews were the logical way to achieve this, to give representative staff members the opportunity to share their experience and views on their profiles, specific to their own contexts. Interviews were scheduled to be completed throughout March, in line with the project schedule of deliverables.

It was important to hear from staff who didn’t use profiles, as well as those who did

Since all University staff can have a profile, and with 7425 profiles published in EdWeb (data from July 2024) there was a very large cohort of people who could be interviewed. The research sought to understand ways to improve current profiles, therefore hearing the perspectives of staff not using profiles, or lacking an awareness of profiles was as necessary as hearing from those who were actively using profiles.

Insights from analysis of UUN data associated with profiles showed there were some groups of staff who used profiles less than others, in particular:

• Professional services staff compared to academic staff
• Staff from the College of Science and Engineering (CSE) compared to staff from the other Colleges
• Younger staff and staff on lower-grade roles (compared to the University population)

Staff from these groups were identified as important to interview, as gaining an understanding of reasons behind their underuse of profiles could indicate ways to improve them.

Read more about the analysis of UUN data and profiles in this blog post: Current usage of University staff profiles: Initial insights from The Role of Profiles project

Forty staff were interviewed, some recruited via a survey, others directly approached

Between August 2024 and January 2025 a survey about profiles was circulated, which 262 staff completed. Responses came from a mix of academic and professional services staff and from staff with varying experience of profiles, indicated by answers to the survey question ‘Do you have a staff profile on the University website?’ (74% of respondents said ‘Yes’, 15% said ‘No’ and 11% of respondents answered ‘Not sure’).

The survey served to recruit staff willing to be interviewed about their profiles, with a final survey question giving the option to provide contact details. Eighty-eight staff offered to be contacted with a relatively even split across academia and professional services. Of those willing to be interviewed, 18 had answered either ‘No’ or ‘Not sure’ to the question about having a profile on the University website, and in light of the project goals, these staff were prioritised to be contacted for interview, as well as professional services staff, and staff from the College of Science and Engineering (CSE).

Data about staff ages and job grades was not collected in the survey, therefore it was not possible to specifically identify younger staff and staff on lower-grade roles to be contacted for interview, however, referring to the University Grade Profiles it was noted that roles below Grade 6 tended to fall into the professional services category, therefore it was decided to try and obtain the perspective of lower-grade staff by trying to interview staff holding junior professional services roles.

Overall, 70 staff were contacted to be interviewed, and throughout March, 40 interviews were conducted with 21 academic staff and 19 professional services staff, including those at early, mid and later career stages, across all three Colleges and Groups, with good representation from CSE.

An open-ended, iterative interview approach aimed to obtain insights from individual contexts

Acknowledging that profiles were likely to have difference purposes, meaning and significance for different staff members was the first step to developing a non-prescriptive interviewing approach which sought to give interviewees the opportunity to speak freely about how profiles fitted into their spheres of work, and their related uses and needs for them.

People exist in their own context. They are centred in their own worlds. Your product, if it appears in their world at all, is one of the tools they are using to make progress on their own purpose – Indi Young ‘Time to Listen’

Interviews were staggered over the month of March, and regular review meetings within the UX team provided the opportunity to reflect and to keeping adapting and iterating the approach to gain the fullest insights.

Interviews sought to probe current usage to uncover opportunities for improvement

In the book ‘Interviewing Users: How to uncover compelling insights’, author Steve Portigal notes that interviewing people about future behaviour can often result in false predictions. Instead of asking people what they want, he advocates for encouraging people to talk about their present actions and behaviour. Learning about the ‘current state’ yields valuable data about existing mental models, associated pain points and mismatched expectations, all of which can help identify real opportunities for improvement. With this in mind, the interviews were designed to engage staff to speak about their current day-to-day, end-to-end experience of using profiles, and to probe them for more detail on negative aspects of their experiences, rather than seek opinions on whether new features or functionality would be desirable or not.

Topics were informed by project goals as well as earlier research findings

To initiate conversations with staff about their profiles in the interviews, a topic guide was prepared with prompts of areas for discussion. Topics came from the project goals but were also guided by insights from earlier research in the project, including the survey results and the analysis of the UUN data associated with profiles.

Broad interview topics cascaded from the project goals

• Importance of online profile content (reasons for having or not having an online profile affiliated with the University)
• Purposes for publishing profile content (information to disperse, audiences to reach)
• Processes and practices to publish profile content (creating profiles, frequency of updates, reasons to update)
• Descriptions of published profile content (categories of content, sources of content)
• Online presence of published profile content (chosen platforms, mechanisms and habits for sharing)

Specific topics highlighted by the UUN data analysis

• How profile usage changes over the course of peoples’ careers
• Differences between profile needs and requirements for academic and professional services staff
• Reasons for disproportionate profile use by individuals from different Colleges (specifically CSE compared to others)

Topics to investigate further raised by the survey free-text comments

• Reasons for not updating profiles (specific associated difficulties and blockers)
• Sources and locations of content to be included in profiles (databases and repositories)
• Internal and external uses of profiles (usage within the University and more widely)
• Styles and categories of content in profiles (how content is written and displayed)
• Content reuse and integration within profiles (models to use content in multiple locations and avoid duplication)
• Searchability of profile content (how audiences search and what they are looking to find)
• Trade-off between consistency and customisability (drivers for each)
• Privacy concerns relating to publishing profile content

Not all of the topics were relevant to all of the interviewees and interviews were conducted to give the staff member the opportunity to raise points relevant to their own experiences and contexts of using profiles.

Details about our process to synthesis and analyse the data collected from the interviews, and our associated learnings about profile stakeholders are documented in a separate blog post:

Profile owners, coordinators and consumers: Making sense of multiple perspectives on staff profiles