If the alpha phase were a theatre staging rehearsals, screen prototypes would be the main event on the stage. They are the visible sign of what visitors would see.

The prototypes we’ve developed in the alpha were led by our user experience and interaction designers. They show how we’d make it easy for anybody reading a news article to connect with the academic experts important to the stories. We’d found huge latent demand for this in our ������Ƭy research.

Prototyping goes beyond what the website visitor sees when they get to a news article, however. It covers how they even stumble across the article in the first place.

Our Digital UX team also worked back-stage, to continue the metaphor, on prototyping ways we might organise news on the site. So that visitors come across news articles that will be helpful to them to make fruitful connections.

What we did back-stage so the right news is shown in the right places

We developed the idea of having one news index page, to try to solve the problem that most news sections are little found. We worked together, with our SEO (search engine optimisation) manager devised a format for web addresses and our UX designers developed an idea for a filter.

This way, we’d have an index that’s easily found, and when a visitor arrives they can easily call up only the articles for one department or centre.

At the same time, we were thinking about all those visitors who’d never seek out news, but who might be helped in their tasks by some categories of news. So our content designer and senior analyst also audited news content and explored data on journeys where some news might be useful. We found:

• that researchers’ looking to collaborate took journeys lacking information on opportunities and who to contact
• that there was a potentially related behaviour from over 84,000 visitors a year to click in, and out, of several staff profiles
• that some categories of news could fill the gaps in information on who could help these visitors if placed in their journeys through the site
• a taxonomy could help to place useful news content in these journeys

For example, the University announced last year was that we’d set up a new institute to work on ensuring ‘artificial intelligence for good’. Our research area, institute and staff profile pages do not make clear who to contact about the opportunity to collaborate on this. We asked ourselves: how might news content help in scenarios like this?

Designing how to showcase news in journeys across the University website

Our user experience professionals grappled with how and where we’d give research pages visitors previews of news content that might help with their tasks.

We needed to surface the value relating to their task of finding work to collaborate on. But we needed to do this without getting in the way of users searching for different things. We sketched how a ‘teaser card’ might indicate a collaboration opportunity, rather than assuming visitors will find news valuable.

We found in testing that flagging fleeting announcements in the middle of permanent content on what a department or centre offers might confuse. The teaser would need to both clearly be a news article, but also clearly show how it is related to collaboration.

In addition, giving a preview of a number of articles might be obstructive for those on mobile devices, magnifying or listening to content, as they have to spend more time scrolling through irrelevant content.

Thinking about how to help publishers to tease the right shows

This made our other back-stage work, improving the authoring experience for news publishers, all the more important. We explored whether a simple taxonomy and content management system fields could give publishers control over what is, and is not, previewed to users on department and centre pages.

As one stakeholder said: “You want these categories so that you can feed the right content to the right people.”

We need to engage stakeholders further on this in the next phase of the project. So that we do not take a billboard-plastering approach to the many news ‘productions’ publishers will be able to stage with our screen prototypes. Instead, we carefully curate news content based on what different visitor groups might engage with.

With thanks to product, analyst and user experience colleagues who I worked closely with on the show!

Links to all sessions below.

For one day only, and to��mark the University’s commitment to OneWeb, the University’s digital team will be hosting the first university-led event of its kind in the sector. Our impressive line-up of speakers will include some of the UK’s stars of content strategy and design as well as user experience. ����

Join us to celebrate the launch of OneWeb.

What we’re planning

Building on the vision and change the OneWeb project demands, we understand the importance of face-to-face conversations that allow for depth, collaboration, and a greater sense of trust.

The OneWeb festival will be free to all our colleagues and students to attend and will take place for one day only. We hope that as many of you from across the University, can join us for some or all of the sessions.

The day will be split into different sessions including talks, workshops and discussions. This format will allow our community to create connections, engage in dialogue and facilitate further cooperation.

You’ll be able to exchange ideas and approaches on topics including

• User needs
• Content-first transformation
• Usability testing
• User research
• Social media and guiding principles
• Agile practices

The Festival will also help you put our team’s names to faces and learn best practice in various digital disciplines. It will help us to continuously improve our services and digital products.

The line up

Padma is the author of and is the lead consultant on the OneWeb project. Padma runs a content design consultancy called Llibertat, following many notable successes as Head of Content Design at the Government Digital Service (GDS). He uses his expertise in content design management and agile content production to help organisations create quality content and maximise the effectiveness of their content teams.

Padma advises organisations on how to set up and deliver successful web content projects, coaches them through the process, and provides content design teams to make it happen.

Padma will deliver a keynote about “Speaking with one voice: Creating great content in large organisations”.

, Hootsuite

Rob is the higher education lead for in the UK and Ireland. With 17 years experience of working in higher education (at four universities), his focus is now on helping institutions succeed with social.

Titled “Are You Listening? Are You Really Listening?”, Rob will present a thought provoking talk about the power of social listening and how it can enhance a university’s ability to improve social experience. He will be joined by our Social Media Lead, Jonny Vaughan, to give more context from the day-to-day work on Southampton’s central channels and some useful best practice advice.

, UX Director, UserZoom

Lee’s been working in remote research for longer than most (as far back as 2008 AD when he founded WhatUsersDo). Lee is passionate about putting UX insight at the heart of decisions, so it’s just as well his focus at is to help brands become customer focused by making research Business as usual (BAU).

Lee will be giving a talk about ‘How organisations can learn about their users in an Agile environment’ and will be joined by our very own Content Team Lead, Chris Lockhart, featuring some tangible examples from our current website.

Katrina Dixon, OneWeb Content Strategist��

Katrina is the Content Strategist for the OneWeb project. She has worked as a Senior Content Designer and Content Strategist on projects including GOV.UK, Barnardo’s and UCL. She creates and improves content and end-to-end user journeys that are simpler, clearer and faster by basing everything on what the user needs.

In User Needs 101 Katrina will show you how to create great content that works by starting with what your users need, and how this approach will work in the OneWeb project.

Mark Wyatt, OneWeb Programme Manager

Mark is the Programme Manager for the OneWeb project. ��His previous role to this was Head of Content at Defra. Mark has managed the delivery of several large content transformation projects for government, including Defra’s Smarter Guidance project. He has also worked on establishing a User Centred Design function and embedding end-to-end service delivery within the organisation.

Mark works with agile project management techniques, delivering content transformation at scale and pace, as well as building team capability and business processes to enable ongoing benefits and improvements.

In ‘Agile 101’ Mark will look at what agile is, what it isn’t, and how we’ll be using it as part of the OneWeb project.

How to attend

If you are interested in the OneWeb project, and would like to learn more about usability testing, content transformation, agile practices, user needs and social media, please book your space for each session below.��

Links to sessions (all in Highfield Campus, unless otherwise stated):

Morning sessions:

• 09:30am – Keynote – Padma Gillen,��
• 10.00am – Katrina Dixon –
• 11.00am – Mark Wyatt –

Afternoon sessions:

• 12.00pm –��Rob Armstrong-Haworth, with Jonny Vaughan,��, Avenue Campus
• 1.00pm – Lee Duddell, UserZoom, with Chris Lockhart,��
• 1.00pm – Mark Wyatt,
• 1.30pm – Katrina Dixon, , Avenue Campus
• 2.00pm –��Keynote – Padma Gillen,��
• 2.00pm –����Lee Duddell, UserZoom, with Chris Lockhart,��
• 2.00pm –��Rob Armstrong-Haworth, with Jonny Vaughan,��

Don’t forget to sign up for more information by subscribing to our .

If you are unable to attend the sessions, we will be blogging about it and are looking into the options of recording the main sessions.

Please share it with colleagues who might not have an instant access to computers and emails.

If you would like to understand more about this project and how it fits in with the wider OneWeb transformation, you can read my blog post: “We’re building better course pages, here’s how you can help”. ��

What were the goals of the course pilot?

In a world of frequent disruption, innovation and change, we are looking to the future of higher education and how the University can play a bigger role in this space, ��by developing digital products that fit with our values and strengths, but also by meeting the needs of our users. Specifically for this pilot phase, our aims were:

• Develop governance for course pages
• Encourage more prospective students to take the next step. For example: come to an open day, or apply for a course

OneWeb Mission Patches

Where are we now?

We just wrapped up the last 10 weeks of the project. We focused on:

• Research – understanding the landscape and gaining insights
• Initial proposition, design and development of our governance and workflow, and building and testing course page prototypes ��
• Understand users’ needs and gain a deeper understanding following the stakeholders’ workshops last November

What we did

The first two weeks were full of planning, gathering and understanding – coming to this project with a true open mind and as few assumptions as possible. We kicked off this project with Institutional Research (IR), we also spoke to FARs and their teams, and started on detailed research and recruiting participants.

In recruiting for our user research, we used the following criteria:

• Undergraduate applicants
• Predicted high achieving grades
• Specifically interested in our sample courses chosen for this pilot
• Have the predicted grades that these courses accept
• Domestic students

The testing was conducted remotely on desktops. There is another piece of research planned for mobile phones only. The three designs we tested were:

• AS IS – our current course pages

Politics and Spanish and Latin American Studies – current (As is) course page��

• HEFCE () – design based on the current , which is already based on solid research ����

– HEFCE course page��

• RAD – stands for Radical design – completely different than what we currently do and heavily utilises the persona work developed ��by IR on this specific audience. We wanted to forget the way it was always done and explore ideas for how else we could do it. We also wanted to introduce more input from current students and highlight how they can make a difference in the world with their degrees.��

– RAD course page��

We ended up recruiting very targeted prospective students. The initial questions were about understanding how they feel about the pages. Down the line we plan to do more specific usability tests to find out more about their actual needs and how effectively our course pages meet them.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the opportunities for governance, workflow and design, and how much digital can help alleviate some of the pains in the current system. Some insights we distilled were related to first impressions, formats, page structure, use of space and well-crafted content that goes beyond the information and transactional element of it.

Other learnings:

• You can never spend enough time with the people who are ultimately going to be using your product / services. There’s just no parallel to spending time with real users. ��
• There are problems that are never anticipated. Again, perceived need could be completely different from actual need.��
• The stakes are higher. Getting the course pages right from the outset and ticking all the boxes from a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), strategic, technical, brand, content structure and governance point of view will give our University a competitive advantage in an extremely crowded marketplace.

Things we didn’t have time to do

Our Alpha is finished for now. We are really hoping to take it to the next phase (Beta) and keep updating and improving a real product. There’s a bunch of things we would have liked to include in this Alpha version, but didn’t have time to. Here’s some things we’re thinking about doing next:

• More SEO research – ranking, keywords and content
• Mobile testing with our users
• Design iterations based on user feedback
• Usability testing
• Develop an information architecture based on findings from our card sort work
• User journey testing to offer additional level of detail with our RAD designs ��
• Amend governance workflow and retest
• Provide more instructions to colleagues who are Single Point of Contact (SPOCs) and Fact Checkers

Next Up

We are currently in the midst of developing our proposition further and we will keep you posted on this pilot and wider OneWeb developments. We are hoping to carry out more Show and Tells in the future, ��as well as completing some of our testing that is already in-flight, and some that requires more of a deep-dive research approach.

So ��for our findings from testing. In addition, if you missed our Show and Tells, you can access the��presentation slides here.

Side note:

We are sorry that due to technical difficulties with the audio, we are unable to share our Show and Tell recordings. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Thank you for reading.

Our Alpha is coming to an end next week. It is still possible to review the work we have undertaken so far on our blog��and we would love to hear your feedback.

As part of our end-of-phase work, we are currently crunching some data from our user research and putting together the information for our Show and Tell.

We are very excited for our Show and Tell next week, where we’ll be sharing everything we’ve learned. We’ll keep our cards close to our chests until then – don’t want to spoil the big reveal! There’s only a few places left, so get yours .

What we’ve done

This has been a week of research, analysis and prep for our presentation.

Launch control

Sue from our Web Content team launched the remote study in our testing platform, UserZoom, after solving several technical complications between vendors. We had an anxious wait before we started collecting responses from year 12 students recruited by YouthSite. When we had collected enough responses, Rosie from Institutional Research (IR) used the study data to create an analysis of the results so far. We will be sharing these insights at the Show and Tell.

Launch control, we are go!
Photo by�����Dz���

The remote study is still collecting responses: at time of writing our quota is 80% full. Once it’s at 100%, Rosie and Needee from Institutional Research (IR) will be doing a full analysis and we’ll use this to inform the next steps – the learning and doing doesn’t stop with the end of Alpha.

Presenting the whole picture

In preparation for the Show and Tell, I have summarised the archive of user research that we’ve done in the build up to Alpha. We’re using this user research, alongside the other aspects of what it takes to maintain course pages, to show the full picture of how course content can be improved. The other factors include:

• governance across the University
• how each of the teams worked together in Alpha
• how content, design and development work together
• how content is designed
• workflow for stakeholders

Ayala and Padma are now preparing their slide deck for the presentation and practising their delivery. Oh… and making sure the catering is delivered on time.

Courses past, present and future

Padma has also been working with Katrina, Jon and Linden on the challenge of showing multiple years of course information to students – past, present and future.

It’s your course pages, Marty. Something’s gotta be done about your course pages!
Courtesy Everett Collection via

What we’ve learnt

We’ve learnt a lot this week while going through all the data sources and reviewing the experiences in the team. We’ll tell you all about it at the Show and Tell.

What we’re doing next

Show and tell

Our for the University community will take place on Tuesday 3 July at Highfield Campus. Places are limited, and available on a first come, first served basis .

Don’t worry if you cannot make it; we will record the presentation and share our deck with you.

Washing up

Kitty, Needee, Rosie, Ayala, Sue, Padma and I will discuss the research needs left over from Alpha, and check what additional information we can extract from the pilot’s data. We’ll be using this to take stock of where we are and make sure we stay aligned to our True North,��as we move on to the next stage.

Maybe looking to come to an open day?

Or perhaps getting to do something you’ve always dreamt about?

Exploring new skills? ������Ƭing your independence?

Which university course page do you remember looking at?

Whatever our prospective students are after, they’ll almost certainly start with course pages, on their phone or a website like ours, or both.

What we’ve done

Card sort testing

We visited a local college and conducted a few exercises with our target audience – high quality prospective students who are interested in going to university in the next three years.

The main objectives for the test were:

• To understand how our users expect our top-level user needs-based content to be organised
• To understand users’ expectations of where course pages would be found
• To find out what ‘natural’ language our users attribute to our content topics and categories of topics

During the test, we asked them questions about what they look for on a course page, and to do a task to sort different course information into categories.

From the Post-it tasks it was clear that the most important criteria were:

• Entry requirements
• Student satisfaction – students’ ratings of teaching (NSS) were very important in the sense that they would like to know what current students think of the university/course
• Course content – details of modules, not just names. In particular, which are optional and which are a compulsory part of the course
• Career opportunities and companies that hired graduates from the course, as well as desired careers and ideas for potential career paths
• Contact details for someone involved in that course, not just generic university contact details
• Similar courses – if they can’t get in, what other options are open to them

Post-it task with our users

Getting our remote tests ready

Sue and Chris have been very busy building remote tests in our platform, UserZoom. The questionnaire was written by Institutional Research (IR) to help us speed things up.��There is a lot to do and we have recruited participants via YouthSite. This build wasn’t without its challenges, but we got there eventually.

A snippet from our online survey in UzerZoom��

Build and development

HEFCE AND RAD designs

Our developer, Jon, has been working (literally) round the clock to complete the build and design of all seven sample pages in the HEFCE and Radical design. This was very labour-intensive work, but he did it! Helped by Linden, they’ve managed to turn around 14 course templates as well as ancillary pages such as accommodation, book for an open day and more!

Getting the alpha site ready for testing

They were also busy getting the alpha site ready for deployment, so Sue and Chris can get it tested by our remote participants. This will enable us to test some of the user journey and see what alterations we need to make.

What we’ve learnt / challenges

A few observations and learning points from this week:

• From a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) point of view, we would like to have more time to conduct keyword analysis and competitor benchmarking, so we can help inform the content from a user perspective and advise if the course names, for example, resonate with our audiences. This is something that we can take to the next phase.
• We need more time for card sort tests and we will ensure that we take it into account in future planning
• Our governance workflow needs adjusting. We mentioned that marketing needs to be involved in the content production workflow and that we will amend it based on the outcome of the experiment. If we have more time, a marketing expert for the relevant faculty should review these as well
• It brings up the question once again about the ownership of the course pages and who this content is written for
• We need an operational content strategy. In the SPOCs and Fact-Checkers workshops (many moons ago), some stakeholders raised the very valid point that they’re having to fact-check and approve content for myriad channels. We can all agree that this is an inefficient use of their time. How content is created, how it is approved and governed has implications. Our old approaches to content production are no longer fit for purpose. This is no longer just about approving a webpage, because there is a broader user journey to take into account and these content pieces could and should be repurposed in multiple contexts. It is about who, what ���Ի���how it will be consumed. This is tricky, but can bring a lot of rewards to the University… if we master it.

What’s next

Next is testing! And crunching data.

Huge thanks again to Needee, Rosie and Kitty from IR for helping us to turn around the analysis quickly. We’re very grateful for the support. I would also like to mention our project team. Everyone worked and is still working really, really hard to ensure that we get the most out of our experiment and bring value to the University.

We’re very keen to share the results with you in our ��on 3 July. Bookings are first come, first served, and with only a few places left we will be closing it soon. Don’t worry if you cannot make it; we will record the presentation and share our deck with you.

Parting words for this week

Nothing like finishing with a good metaphor:

“If a business was an ocean explorer, then content strategy would be the compass. You can have the best boat, a killer crew and a meticulous map. But without a compass, you won’t know if you’re sailing in the right direction.��

True North on the content strategy compass is a single, shared goal: to create experiences our users love by delivering the right information, to the right user, at the right time. Makes sense, right?!” –��

“There’s content in them thar hills.”
���dzܰ�����:�����Dz���

Thank you for reading.

What we’ve done

Governance can be a hard sell, so this week I wanted to share some of the practical thinking about how we’ve experimented with the governance of our course pages.

Why do we need governance of course pages?

Course pages are complicated in terms of governance. There are a lot of fingers in the pie so to speak. We all tend our course pages in a different way and from speaking to our stakeholders, we all wish that we had clarity of roles and responsibilities.

Fingers in the pie. Source:

Believe it or not, governance can help us to:

• prioritise stuff so we can move much faster
• deliver the things we need to deliver
• Provide assurance that we’re achieving our objectives

What we’ve done:

This week, our Single Points of Contact (SPOCs) coordinated the course content that we had provided to them, within GatherContent workflow. Overall, more than half of the faculties’ SPOCs completed the workflow process with no major issues, and submitted the content for some further refinements. Shout out to Medicine and FEE who speeded through the workflow like nobody’s business.

Our templates in GatherContent post fact-check amends

We built a RAD

We also completed the technical build of our radical (RAD) design prototype where, on this occasion, the design is entirely content-driven. This is the first time that our developer and UX Designer was able to work on a content-first approach template.

There are many benefits for content-first approach, such as:

• websites are built around information, instead of just eye-catching designs and visuals
• it encourages organic traffic to the page through good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) linking because of the quality of the information
• much more beneficial for branding – the design only enhances and creatively displays the information about the brand, not the other way round
• it prevents back and forth, time-consuming corrections having to be made to the design, which is more costly
• it makes responsive design significantly easier to plan ahead and implement
• the process encourages unique and original design

One of our depth components – without giving too much away!

What we’ve learnt

Governance

• communication is the single biggest way to improve governance. People working in silos often don’t communicate effectively across silos. Containing everything in the one workflow programme is good, as everyone can see what has been going on
• as there is no institutional workflow, it was difficult for us and our SPOCs to identify whose responsibility it is to check what, and in what order. This is why it is really important that we truly have single points of contact i.e. the ability to liaise with one single person
• some of our SPOCs found it hard to know who to assign the bits of text to for checking, and also felt that marketing should be involved in this process: perhaps as an originator (pre-draft stage) or at the end of the process. We had many conversations about it this week and we agree with these comments. As a result, we are going to make a change to the workflow and put it forward as one of our recommendations.
• making it clear how to turn off the email alerts would be useful – not everyone needs to receive an alert after every comment is made. Perhaps this is a unique problem if there are two fact checkers.
• in some of the faculties, especially where there were more than two fact-checkers, there was lack of clarity over the roles and responsibilities.
• there were some inaccuracies in the existing course content currently live on our website, which we have now corrected

Thanks to all our SPOCs and fact-checkers

We want to put in a special thanks for all our SPOCs and fact-checkers for their diligent work and fast turnaround. And especially for getting involved and being a good sport, by dedicating time to help us out during a very busy time of year. Thank you all, we’re not taking it for granted. ��

What we’re doing next

Show and tell

Our for the University community will take place on Tuesday 3 July at Highfield Campus. Places are limited, and available on a first come, first served basis .

Build and design

We’re creating dummy pages to allow for user journeys and testing via our prototype website.��We’re also completing the final touches on all the remaining prototype sample pages so we can test them with users.

User research

Our sample has been verified and we’re gearing up for tests next week. We need to build many surveys in our testing platform and these will be administered online. ��We’re also carrying out card sort and tree tests on the navigation with our target audience in schools.

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend and thanks for reading.

Why call this post a content design revolution?

I know calling it ‘the content design revolution’ is a bit dramatic. Although it isn’t quite a revolution, it’s still a good way of grabbing your attention! ​��

I have noticed that, since we started the OneWeb consultation and the course pilot, more colleagues are becoming interested in content design as an approach for user-centric web content. Why? Because it solves many of the issues modern websites have, including ours.

The issues ��

One of the biggest issues with the website is that it’s hard to find a sustainable, user-centred solution for producing and managing quality content at scale. Our content problems are like every other big organisation. ��

We have:

• Too much content
• Unintuitive user journeys
• Lack of governance
• Big flabby digital channels
• Content that is ego-centric, not user-centric (organisational needs vs user needs)

Organisational needs vs. User needs, source: xkcd.com

What we did

Enter content design – ta-da!

I don’t want to keep highlighting problems without ever finding a solution. There is a solution, a tried and tested one!

Remember the user needs workshops��from last year? We’ve introduced the user stories that emerged in those sessions as a starting point. Hundreds of colleagues have participated and bought into the user-centric approach behind OneWeb.

And for the past two sprints we’ve been creating content for all sample course pages, with the ultimate goal of simplifying our course page content, making it more readable and applicable to our users (prospective students), and more importantly – using the language that would appeal to them.

An example user story

We haven’t been working on it in isolation. We are talking to Institutional Research, we refined our testing, modified the baseline due to time constraints and have looked at what we could realistically achieve since we are now halfway through the project!

Sue and Chris in the web content team have also finished writing up the task-based study and launched it to the world via the Open Day emails. We also put in place the building blocks for the testing and the navigation by using and information architecture validation tests. More on this in the forthcoming sprints.

Build and design

We created three versions for each of our sample course pages:

• As is – this is our current course page template
• HEFCE – a template based on the HEFCE guidelines with some slight modifications to the current template
• RAD – a radical content design version. We are building the design for it in this current sprint (sprint 7)

An example Hero Banner from our Depth framework

All of these have been plugged into our content workflow software, GatherContent, and are ready for our fact checkers and Single Point Of Contact (SPOCs) to test the governance process. As it is a busy time of year, we’ve asked them to fact check the RAD template and only comment on factual accuracy. Communication to SPOCs was sent out this week.

A screenshot from our GatherContent project status

Needless to say that all three versions, for each course, will be tested in our user research to establish the experience and to ensure that they’re getting what they need out of the content.

What we learnt

Less, but better

Our UX and frontend developer, Jon, has created three different frameworks in flat HTML templates for us to put in front of our users.

Source:

So what have we learnt?

• We always need more time, whether it is design, coding or conducting user research, but we need to deliver what we can with the time we actually have.
• Reaffirmed that simplicity is the mother of usability. A good design speaks for itself, without asking the user to commit much effort. If the user can intuitively deduce what to do with our design, that’s brilliant! If they need instructions, that’s not so good… we learnt to concentrate on the essential aspects, so that the template designs are not burdened with non-essentials, therefore making it better for the user. Back to simplicity.
• We need to start planning the user testing a lot earlier, especially where there are more stakeholders whose time is short
• The user research process would be helped by developing a set of templates for user testing briefs, and plans that prompt the right questions

What we’re doing next

• We are going to rewrite the task-based study and send this out via YouthSite
• Chris is working on the build of the card sort / tree test.
• It is also worth us taking a look at some of the data that has already come through, to see if there are any patterns of feedback developing that might inform the iterations.
• We will be working to complete the RAD design and slotting all new content in

Final thoughts

Doing things right takes time. We’re very keen to show the importance of content design once we have metrics to compare before and after.

Show & tell

As we’re heading to the finishing line of our Alpha phase, we will be carrying out a show and tell event for all interested colleagues, and would encourage you to attend.��

The show and tell will be on Tuesday 3 July at 2pm and we will be sending out more details in due course. We will also hold an exclusive session for the OneWeb Advisory Group in the morning.��

The afternoon session will be filled on a first come, first served basis. If you’re unable to attend, we will be sharing the presentation, and filming our wider show & tell with all of our stakeholders.

That’s it for this week. Have a good weekend!

In my previous post, we concentrated on our project’s ambition and understanding all the various stakeholders involved with the course pages through the fact-checkers workshops. In this post, I will be sharing more about the content creation work – it’s importance, how we approach it and what tools we use to test and support it.

What we did

Writing course page content

Understand the courses we’re selling

“Every product has a unique personality and it is your job to find it” – Joe Sugarman

We know that small things can make a big difference, and this is especially true in web content. The shortest of phrases and even single words, coupled with how they are designed and where they are or are not placed on a page, can affect a user’s experience.

We’ve been working on some of our course content, starting with BSc Oceanography with Physical Geography.

Writing online is fundamentally about guiding users to achieve their goals, helping them to solve their problems, motivating the right behaviours.

Its success lies in the micro-moments.

So, we’ve been experimenting more with our writing. We start with the course page description: highlight the benefits and help our users accomplish something they want to accomplish. For example, increase 25% of all users to find module information after researching the course.

Understanding our users

• Who are they?
• Would they like to buy our product?
• Are they finding what they need on the course page?
• What do they love about it?
• What are their pain points? ..and so on

This is where the excellent personas Institutional Research (IR) have developed come in very handy. They’re truly outstanding and we constantly refer back to them. It’s also where we carry out additional user research to validate what we wrote and to ensure our users truly accomplish their goals online.

User research tests

This week we’ve completed the build of all our remote user research. Special thanks go to the UK Outreach Recruitment team, especially Paul and Gail, who have been extremely helpful by putting us in touch with their contacts in colleges and independent schools. The plan is to run the tests with both domestic and international users in key strategic locations.

Why remote research?

When you’re working with an agile project, remote research allows you to fit many user sessions into a single day and iterate quickly. It can be an extremely valuable addition to other research methodology. Apart from speed, it also allows us to access a large amount of the right participants in diverse geographical locations. The testing is designed for desktop and mobile devices.

An example from user testing.

Build and design

The new content will be used in new flat HTML templates which will then be used in the remote testing.

What we learned

Completing all our sprint’s tasks sometimes take longer than you think. The user testing threw a few curve balls our way, but we’re hopeful that we can work around them all in time. We had to adapt our plans accordingly to ensure we save ourselves some time elsewhere and not impact our project significantly.

It is also becoming apparent that course pages are too important to leave to chance. Each one should get the attention it needs. With a proper workflow and clear understanding of the aims, we think this can be done efficiently as part of OneWeb. ��

What we’re working on next

A number of key important activities will be worked on next:

• Completion of user testing and start on the analysis of the work
• Ensuring SEO is integral to the content creation and is truly baked in – this is where all the keywords analysis of our SEO team will be extremely useful and benchmarks against the competition
• Complete writing all the course sample pages
• Finish building all the templates in GatherContent and start on testing the workflow with the SPOCs and Fact-Checkers ����

A retrospective

Overall, this sprint for me was about articulating the needs of our users via our course content: making it easier for prospective students to find the information they need easily, and ultimately apply to undertake a degree at our university.

This sprint certainly felt quite fast, with little time to stop and think, though personally I think it’s important to time-box these activities so you don’t get stuck overthinking things.This is only the start of our process and we now have seven more weeks to develop these ideas and prototypes for this phase.

We want to prove that when we remove those barriers around mindset, culture and collaboration, we can create new and improved course pages, fit for the 21st century. Watch this space.

Lots done, lots still to do. That’s all for now. Thank you for reading.

What we did

Course pilot workshops

As the title suggests, the theme for this week is our unsung heroes of this project – our nominated Single Point of Contact (SPOCs) and the fact checkers who spared some of their valuable time to join in our workshops yesterday.

The workshops were a big highlight to our project this week. I thought they were brilliant because:

1. It’s so useful to break down silos and mix up teams. This is a rare thing in small companies, let alone a big enterprise like our University. It was uplifting to be reminded that we’re actually all working towards the same goals.
2. Sharing very different kind of expertise got us clear insights and a clear way forward. We now know what our challenges are and what we can do about them.

If you missed our workshops and would like to catch up on what we’ve covered, .

You can also access the presentation slides here.��As always, if you have any questions, please just get in touch.

SEO audit

We also completed our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) audit on the sample course pages, and some of the content issues have been highlighted again. They are centred around:

• Duplication
• Gaps

Which in turn create:

• Confusion for users
• Poor experience for users
• An extremely expensive to maintain website

Here’s just one example of duplicated course pages.

User research test plan

Our baseline testing plan has been finalised and signed off by Institutional Research (IR). This is really positive and we have a lot of work to complete between now and the end of the project. The testing will be ongoing.

What we learned

1. We have too much duplication in course pages and need to focus on what’s good for the (end) user. ��
2. Our course pages are confused. We have too many conflicting messages to our mixed audiences (prospective and current students), and we need to decide what the website is for and which audience it is for.
3. We’re asking our fact-checkers to check multiple expressions of the same content (eg course page, subject brochure, prospectus and so on). This creates inefficiencies in terms of their time, but also additional workload.
4. The way we speak to our users has to be consistent. We have too many stakeholders creating content on these pages and this is part of the confused picture.
5. Colleagues raised some very valuable questions; some in relation to this particular project, some related to the bigger OneWeb project, and some are to do with University processes and protocols.
6. For now, it is best if we focus this experiment on UG courses only, since PG have additional and differing needs, and we’d like to give them the full attention they deserve. As a result, in consultation with IR, we have changed one of our sample courses. Instead, we chose to work on the BN (Hons) Bachelor of Nursing (Adult).

What we’re working on next

• Next sprint will see us getting the SPOCs to experiment with the workflow that we’ve set up in GatherContent.
• We are also going to start working on the development of prototypes to test with real users.
• We will carry on with our user research and some of the analysis from the studies we’ve completed.

Parting words

Our approach is to start with some manageable tasks and then build it up from there. It is great to see colleagues’ appetite for change and to also think about a content-led approach in a broader way.

This is just the start. We’ve got some big ambitions for the project over the coming weeks.

Thank you for reading.

Stories are powerful and spark emotions. As we dive in further into this project, and familiarise ourselves more and more with our external users, they become a vital part of the end product. More on this later in these notes.

What we’ve been working on and what we’ve learnt

This sprint included a lot of chunky tasks that we pushed forward from the previous couple of weeks. For the purpose of this pilot, user testing is going to be a vital element for validating some of the information we gathered at the user needs workshops last year. ��We are also gathering new information through user testing to inform the baseline of this project.

User research

Sprint 2 saw us completing our testing plan, and getting it signed off by Institutional Research (IR) and our external consultants from Scroll. This work will also help benchmark the new pages vs the old pages.

The user research is about getting a wider understanding of the (external) users of a service, or organisation. We need to learn more about their environment, their perspective, their pain points, and above all, what they need and want to do online. Explaining all of this clearly and accessibly is so important in getting our message across to the wider University community.

So why are we doing it?

Apart from having a better understanding of who is at the receiving end of our content, knowing our users better allows us to:

• make evidence-based business decisions
• build better and more accessible services online
• work more efficiently as an organisation
• build stronger relationships and connections with our stakeholders (eg subject experts) within the University

To this end, we’ve been setting up the tests in our user testing platform and have recruited participants that matched the relevant criteria. This process will continue into the next few sprints, because our testing is staggered and will take a number of weeks to complete.

Prototype content creation

We’ve also started to create the content for the prototypes. This is following the content audit that we carried out for the sample course pages. From the research IR have already shared with us, it is very clear that the current and next generation of students are looking for a compelling story to motivate them when making decisions about where and what to study. This is important for our project’s future outcomes.

Technical build

We also held our first technical call for the prototype pages. We need to make some decisions about how to best showcase the results in a visual way. As we have some User Experience (UX) expertise in-house, we have ensured that our Digital Marketing System Officer, Linden McKenzie and his team are on hand to advise and develop a suitable solution. More information on this in forthcoming sprints.

Booking the workshops, finalising SPOCs

Our project is short and fast, so to get all faculties involved, decisions need to be made quickly. We know that this can be hard in a big place like our university.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Faculty Academic Registrars (FARs) and their teams. It was really good and reassuring to get them all on board quickly as their support is vital for the success of this pilot.

Today (Friday) is the last opportunity for faculties and academic leads, or Director of Programmes (DoPs) to be part of the governance element of this pilot. Due to the speed of this project, we will only be able to work with faculties who have provided a Single Point of Contact (SPOC) and academic leads for us to work with and test the governance framework. However, we will still produce and test content for all the sample course pages that we selected.

Speaking to Content Strategy MA students from FH Joanneum University

In between the intensive deadlines of this (and other) projects, I found some time to go to London with Padma Gillen of Scroll to deliver a presentation about ‘making content strategy stick’. This is a , one of only a handful like it in the world, and the academic lead made contact with us a while back after they heard through the grapevine what we’re up to.

We rubbed shoulders with the likes of GatherContent, Google, Facebook, Government Digital Service (GDS) to name but a few. We talked about the user needs approach and how positively it was received at the University, as well as the course pilot. The students will soon be graduating and moving into content teams of their own, I think they found a valuable lesson on the relationships between theory and practice!

Padma and me at

What we will be working on next

Our user research and testing is set to continue and we are also going to run some workshops with our Single Point of Contact (SPOCs), fact checkers and other interested parties.

We’ll be running a couple of workshops at 10am and 2pm on Thursday 17 May – they will consist of two parts:

• Part 1: ��Open to all who want to hear what we’ve learned and what we propose – it will be approximately half hour presentation followed by questions and answers.
• Part 2: ��just for the SPOCs (nominated by the FARs), and any fact checkers for the specific course pages, to be able to work with us on the governance model. We’re hoping for this part to be more interactive. ��

That’s it for this sprint. Thank you for reading and please get in touch with any questions.