Staff and students completed a top tasks survey as part of the Learn Foundations research. This helped us understand what is most important to them when they use Learn for teaching and learning in the hybrid context. 

Phase Three of Learn Foundations has carried out important research to investigate how Learn is supporting the needs of staff and students as they continue to teach and learn in the hybrid context, brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic.

We have recently completed a short collaboration with the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies to better understand the needs of students of online postgraduate courses. The findings may help us understand the differing needs of students online compared to on-campus.

As we are all adapting to the “new normal”, working techniques have changed tremendously. I am Tasniva Mumu, and I have been working with the University of Edinburgh Website and Communications team within Information Services for the last 6 months as a user experience intern.

After completing the top tasks survey and the card sort as part of the Learn Foundations project, our next step was to create a prototype information architecture and test it.

Over the last 3 months I had the opportunity to work on a research project with the aim to improve MyEd for staff. MyEd for students had already gone through a transformation earlier in the year, and this was a chance to bring about similar improvements for the staff view of the portal.

As part of our programme of user research in support of the Learn Foundations project, we have carried out a top tasks survey to understand what students need when accessing course materials online.

This month’s WPC session focused on top tasks management, Snapshot (a new tool to evaluate your EdWeb site) and Drupal development experiences.

I had an opportunity to attend a masterclass held by Gerry McGovern, the pioneer of top tasks — a key user research tool used by our team for ten years.

In most walks of life, a small number of things are significantly more important than the rest. To be effective as the manager of a web presence or service, you need to know what matters most to your target audiences. Fortunately this is fairly easy to do.