We’re about to get started on our Continuous Improvement project for Portal Services. This is a new project that will continue over the next 5 years, and will allow us to enhance and update our services to meet changing needs.

We’re still at the planning and research stage, so we definitely don’t know everything that we’ll be doing in the next 5 years, but this is what we expect to be working on in the next few months.

MyEd on mobile

MyEd doesn’t work as well as it could do on mobile devices.  It can be hard to navigate, making it difficult to get the content you need quickly. There’s too much information on the homepage, meaning that you need to do a lot of scrolling to get to things like Favourites, for example. We’re planning to make some changes to how MyEd displays on mobile devices, to make it easier to use.

Personalisation

Last year we ran a pilot for Moray House students, exploring how we can use personalisation in MyEd to improve the experience of our users.  The idea of personalisation is that by using information we know about our users, and about what’s happening at certain times of year, we can surface information that is particularly relevant or timely.  Last year’s pilot focussed on school based content, and we’re extending this to run for another year. We’re also planning to run another couple of pilots looking at more general support information, to see whether there are ways we can make it easier for you to find the information you need, when you need it.

Find out more about personalisation in MyEd

Notifications

There’s a separate project which will be upgrading the technical components of the Notifications Service, to make sure that it’s secure and up-to-date.

We hope to take advantage of this project to make the technology available as an Open Source project which will allow other institutions to use it, and help us to develop it further.

We’re also going to make some changes to how Notifications display in MyEd.  We know from our research that users don’t always see Notifications, and that it’s not obvious when you have new Notifications to check. We’re going to make them a bit more visible, and make it clearer when you have new Notifications.

Whole user journeys

We’re carrying on with our work to understand whole user journeys, and the ways that our services interact with others, and how this can be improved. Last year we carried out a series of interviews with students at different points during the academic year, and we’re planning to do this again, to build on what we learned last year, and fill in the gaps.

Find out more about whole user journey mapping for Portal Services

Identities

We’re also going to be exploring identities.  We often take a simplistic approach to identities, and assume that users are one thing or another – student or staff, school x or school y. In reality users can be many things at the same time, and we want to understand more about this, and how this changes what you need from our services.

More to come

These are some of the things we know we want to work on in the coming months, but there will be more to come. We’ll keep sharing our plans as they develop.