The Prospective Student Web Content Team, led by Neil Allison, focuses on delivering effective website experiences for prospective students at the University of Edinburgh. The team emphasizes user research, service design, and continuous improvement through agile methods, with specific priorities including enhancing information on fees and entry requirements. Upcoming workshops and community involvement are encouraged to refine their strategies and align with student needs.

1. Prospective Student Web
Content Team
Introducing the team and our current priorities
Neil Allison
December 2019

2. Overview of today’s session
• 30 min: Intro slides
• About the team
• What are websites really for?
• How we will operate
• Priorities for the short, medium and long term
• How to get involved
• 20 min: Questions?
• 70 min: Workshop activity
• Hands on, small group collaboration
• Help us set our priorities

3. Hello, I’m Neil
• Head of the Prospective Student Web Content Team
• 15 years with the University of Edinburgh
• 20+ years in higher education
• Previously User Experience Service Manager in Information Services
• Before that: CMS Service Manager, Web Marketing Manager,
Student Recruitment & WP Officer, Teacher…
• www.ed.ac.uk/profile/neil-allison

4. About the
Prospective Student Web Content Team
• A new team based in Communications and Marketing
• Arising from Student Recruitment and Admissions strand
of the Service Excellence Programme
• A dedicated, permanent team with expertise in:
• User research & service design
• Content strategy & content design
• Information architecture
• Software development
• Based at Room 5.01, St Leonards Land, Holyrood Road
• edin.ac/prospective-student-content

5. A new team in Communications & Marketing
Niall Bradley (Deputy
Director, Marketing)
Neil Allison
(Head of Prospective Student
Web Content Team)
Gayle Whittaker
(User Experience
Specialist)
Cameron Edwards
(Editorial Team
Manager)
Editorial Officer
x6
TBC
(Software Developer)
TBC
(QA & Analytics)
Team info: edin.ac/prospective-student-content

6. Our goal
“To deliver effective,
efficient and satisfying
prospective student
website experiences”

7. We’ll do this by…
• Researching, co-designing, sharing – with students & subject matter experts
• Learning, evolving and iteratively improving – our practices, our services
• Evidencing our decisions and working in the open
• Working closely with IS Website & Comms to deliver future web services
• Management of the Degree Finders, working towards a new future state

8. Key concepts: behaviours and tasks
• The website is a tool to change student behaviours
• Making them more successful in what they need to do
• Reducing behaviours that are costly to the University
• Focus on the most critical tasks to bring
maximum impact and return on investment

9. We’re in the service business
•Our challenge isn’t fixing the website as a thing
•This is about delivering digital services
•It just so happens that our services are
typically delivered via websites
…but in 5 years?

10. A small number of tasks are disproportionately important to
prospective students. In a 2018 prospective student study:
 The top 4 tasks accounted for 25% of all votes
 The top 9 tasks accounted for over 50% of all votes
 The top task was more popular than the bottom 19 tasks
User Vision said:
‘Tuition fee costs’ and ‘Entry requirement’ emerged as
joint super tasks across many different prospective
student audiences and geographies, gaining as many
votes as the bottom 28 tasks.
All website content is not equal

11. Students have top tasks
More about top task user research:
https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/optimising-long-neck/

12. Maximise impact by focusing
on top task success

13. What do we want
them to do?
What do they
want to do?
Balance our
priorities with theirs Measure how
we’re doing
How to get a grip of your website and then keep hold: http://bit.ly/get-a-grip-website

14. Derived from: www.gov.scot/publications/the-scottish-approach-to-service-design
University services aim to solve student problems

15. Derived from: www.gov.scot/publications/the-scottish-approach-to-service-design
But underneath student problems are lots of needs

16. Derived from: www.gov.scot/publications/the-scottish-approach-to-service-design
We can make things worse by expecting students to
know where to find help for all the things they need in
order to get over the problem they’re facing.

17. Derived from: www.gov.scot/publications/the-scottish-approach-to-service-design
We need to build user and service focused thinking into
all University departments so service design can
be delivered across organisational boundaries seamlessly

18. Agile approach, continuous improvement…
• Adopting an agile approach to fixing student problems
through better content design
• Delivering prioritised, continuous improvements
through short bursts of activity for faster impact and learning
• Feeding evidence and insight back into the decision-making process
• Adjusting to evolving business and user needs in a timely fashion

19. Steering groups
prioritise user
needs against
operational
business priorities
Sprint
planning
Sprint
review
Executive group
ratifies a single
backlog in line
with strategic
priorities, on a
quarterly basis.
Team agrees priority tasks for
attention with SMEs & services
within the area of focus, based
on evidenced user need and
operational feasibility
Team works on time-
boxed tasks with direct
involvement of SMEs,
services & students as
appropriate
At the end of each sprint,
progress is reviewed and
lessons learned. 3 actions:
1. Features released
2. Feeds into next sprint
3. Issues sufficiently
addressed to prompt
reprioritisation
1
3
2
UG
PGT
PGR

20. Steering priorities transparently
Three steering groups
• UG, WP & Visiting
• PGT and OL PGT
• PGR
• Reps from:
• College SRA
• Central SRA & CaM
• Student Enquiries and PCIM
• Maintaining 3 backlogs of student
behaviour priorities
Executive steering group
• Ratifying a master backlog of
priorities, against Strategy 2030
• Directors of:
• SRA
• Marketing
• Edinburgh Global
• Recruitment at College level
• Feeding into SRA Board &
Web Governance Group

21. Proposed project focus: short to medium term
Short term to end February 2020
• Deliver early sprints as POC
• Identify members for steering and
governance groups
• Recruit outstanding team members
• Areas of delivery (for PGT):
• Fees and cost of study
• Website search results
• Funding opportunities
Project to end July 2020
• Fully operational steering and governance
functions
• Team fully in place and working partnerships
with key services
• Responsibility matrix for business-critical
student content
• Communities of practice established
• Deliver enhancements for all levels of study
• Fees and cost of study
• Funding opportunities
• Entry requirements
• University rankings

22. Agile delivery in sprints
• Working transparently and in rapid cycles,
improvements to the website can be released every two weeks.

23. Long term service delivery
• Continuous improvement as business-as-usual
• Ongoing cycle of user research and business review
• Operational and strategic alignment with PCIM
and Student Enquiry Teams
• Future state for provision of programme content for prospective
students research, consultation and co-design

24. Get involved…
• Share our upcoming events: http://bit.ly/PSweb-dec-events
• Thursday 5 December, 10:00-12:00 (Kings Buildings)
• Tuesday 10 December, 10:00-12:00 (Central Campus)
• Thursday 12 December, 14:30-14:30 (Central Campus)
• Join the mailing list for monthly blog highlights & event notifications
• edin.ac/prospective-student-content
• Watch out for the usability testing review sessions
• Prospective postgraduates doing fees and funding tasks
• January dates – book a place: http://edin.ac/fees-playback
• Software developer needed: edin.ac/cam-developer
• Open ended Grade 7, but secondments are a possibility too. Ask me!

25. Thank you
Questions?
Neil Allison
Head of Prospective Student Web Content
edin.ac/prospective-student-content

26. Workshop activity
Help us to prioritise our future work

27. Before we begin…
• Broadly speaking we are:
• People who engage directly with prospective students & applicants
• People who provide foundations for those engagements
• We need to do this activity with people facing similar challenges
• Please move to locate yourself with colleagues who have similar
responsibilities to you

28. Benefits realisation
• The Service Excellence Programme outlined the
expected benefits of establishing the
Prospective Student Web Content Team
• Page 10 of SRA001 Business Case document
• But we need meaningful measures that
demonstrate that the Prospective Student Web
Content Team’s activity is having the desired
impact
• We need impact metrics

29. Turning benefits into defined measures
Improved prospective
student experience
Fewer ineligible or
wasted applications
Management information that
improves decision making
Facilitates CMA compliance
Reduced duplication of effort
when updating information
Fewer *unnecessary*
enquiries
Coordinated & accountable
content management

30. Turning benefits into defined measures
Improved prospective
student experience
Fewer ineligible or
wasted applications
Management information that
improves decision making
Facilitates CMA compliance
Reduced duplication of effort
when updating information
Fewer *unnecessary*
enquiries
Coordinated & accountable
content management

31. Changing user behaviour: example
Impact User behaviour User behaviour
#2
User behaviour
#3
User behaviour
#4
User behaviour
#5
Fewer ineligible
or wasted
applications
Ineligible
students don’t
apply
Students
independently &
accurately
appraise their
eligibility
Students
independently
establish their fee
status
Students
confidently
calculate their
total cost of study
Students identify
their tuition fees,
extra programme
costs, living
expenses

32. Task 1 – for recruitment & admissions roles
• Write down up to 3 things you wish your prospective student
enquirers and applicants would do more often
• Be more specific than “Visit the website”
• Think about tasks associated with the application decision making process
• Pick on the things that cause you most ‘pain’

33. Task 1 – for supporting roles
• Write down up to 3 things you wish your colleagues would do more
often
• Can be local colleagues, or college, or central support
• Think about tasks associated with the application decision making process
• Pick on the things that cause you most ‘pain’

34. Task 2 – all groups
1. Sensemaking together
• Group related items together on the wall
• Clarify meaning of post-its
• Edit & de-duplicate
2. Classifying together
• Can you give each group a label?
• If it’s too hard, you’ve got more than one group. Groups of one item are fine too.
3. Prioritising
• You each get 5 dots to assign to the most important
• Put as many as you like on any one yellow note

35. What will we do with this information?
• We’re building a tree of user behaviours through a series of staff
consultations
• We’re going to ask recruitment, admissions and marketing colleagues to
prioritise behaviours to generate long neck graphs from a staff perspective
• We’ll feed this into the steering group prioritisation process, along with
student top task data
• We’ll share our evolving priorities regularly via blog and mailing list

36. Mapping user
behaviours to impact
• We’re building tree diagrams
that map the 4 impact metrics
to the changes in user
behaviour you’ve identified
• Fewer ineligible or
wasted applications
• Fewer unnecessary enquiries
• Management information that
improves decision making
• Reduced duplication of effort
when updating information

37. Thank you for your help today
We’ll share our findings and next steps via the blog:
edin.ac/prospective-student-content