On Thursday 7 November 2109, I was asked to speak at the Squiz Summit on how we promote the work we do with our search engine, and how we analyse the performance of search. I realised I hadn’t blogged it previously, so thought I’d summarise here.

I’ve been thinking about the ways in which we align our digital products with wider strategic direction, and how we can measure whether the changes we make are working for our users and customers. In particular, I’ve been considering how we can make data-informed decisions about the University’s search service.

The University Web Search is changing on 22 March. It will feature new ways to search content and access results, including autosuggestions and a customised output for profile pages.

Tools are available to help research the keywords our visitors use when searching our sites. We can use this information to better understand their needs, and to optimise our content to meet those requirements.

Back in September 2016, the University initiated a procurement exercise to replace its current central search engine. As we are nearing on deciding the successful vendor, it’s a great time to provide a project review, revisit the vision and explore the opportunities this new search engine will present.

The University will shortly start a procurement exercise on the University central search engine. In preparation, I recently conducted search analytics research to attempt to better understand the way our users engage with search.

I recently conducted an on-campus contextual inquiry as a UX research method. My work aimed to help inform the procurement of the new central Search service of the University.

In the process of redesigning the website’s search results page, I tried out rapid collaborative prototyping and found it dramatically speeded up my design development and helped to build consensus with stakeholders in the team.

The new University search engine launched on 9 July after a nine month research and development period.

I presented yesterday on my recent work to identify what University staff would like us to prioritise as we begin to look at enhancing the website search tool. In this post, I’ll cover how and why I did it, and what the Website Programme will be doing with what I discovered.