We know from previous research that our users value personalisation in our digital services. What might that mean for the future of MyEd?

Quality content, delivered to the right person, at the right time. It’s not as easy as it sounds: that requires deep understanding of our users, along with sound knowledge of our business needs.

Snacks and personalisation

I love snacks and quality messaging. So I was glad of a recent ‘Think with Google’ blog for inspiration for this post.

Oreo: Ad personalisation at scale (Think with Google blog)

I believe that we’ve come to the point where we need to start trying out personalisation – or risk being left behind.

What’s stopped us in the past?

While we’ve had ambitions to explore the potential, we’ve not always been sure of the technology – or the message. As Google put it in their above piece:

Scaling personalisation requires a symbiotic relationship between creative, tech and media

We’re now increasing our understanding of what MyEd can do – and through researching our users needs, we’re also beginning to better understand where we can better serve them. Again, from Google (via Marie Kondo?):

Technology alone does not create moments of joy for consumers, but it allows us to be relevant and in the moment with them at scale. With digital, we can monitor, adapt, and deploy creative to maximise effectiveness…

So what might ‘good’ personalisation look like within the MyEd portal – how can we ‘spark joy’ for our users?

MyEd personalisation

MyEd (and associated Portal Services) already deliver a personalised experience: you get a different layout and set of services based on your role (staff, students, applicants and alumni) at the University.

However, we believe further and better curation and targeting of content within the portal – based on what we know about users – will increase engagement and reduce dissatisfaction. Even if underlying services stay the same, by understanding how and when our users engage with them, we can simplify and streamline interactions.

Embracing the potential of the MyEd portal to monitor, adapt, and deploy different versions of portal content based on people’s needs at specific times will allow us to be more relevant and more timely, at scale.

Wider uses for personalisation

Understanding positive and negative impacts of personalisation has potential use across the University web estate, enabling us to align how best to connect with different audiences across channels.

We’re going to kick off a project shortly with a series of tests that aim to deliver, test and monitor some methods of increased personalisation within the MyEd Portal:

• curated content for individual schools/programmes
• use of the portal itself, or our analytics and tag management software, to deliver A/B (or multivariate) testing/test groups
• research into additional user attributes that could potentially deliver value (such as year of study or aspects of a staff member’s role)

Get involved

If you’re interested in becoming involved in this project, either as a user or content owner, please get in touch.

MyEd Help and Support