There are more common service types than youā€™d imagine across an organisation as large as ours. We call these ā€˜design patternsā€™ and they enable us to create a consistent approach to how we design, build, test and recycle technical solutions effectively and efficiently. Things like applying for a programme, booking for events, finding a person, or a facility, and receiving notifications from us.

We are taking a whole-university approach to digital platforms so the common services which are delivered to people are more consistent and easier to use.

And in business terms – platforms offer savings, encourage collaboration and innovation, efficiency and responsiveness. But what they are really about is delivering a better experience for the people who use university services – an experience which is consistent, simple and makes it easy to get things done.

Still with me?

As our new undergraduate course pages are about to go live, our purpose is to create a new and improved product. But it is also an opportunity to do something clever – ā€˜the OneWeb way’.

What is the OneWeb way?

When we first started redeveloping a new product, we knew we had to practice what we preach: we need to follow our own best practice advice and guides, but also to live up to the vision of OneWeb which is centred around innovation and agility.

Part of this work was to assess new infrastructure that will provide solid security as well as be nimble enough to quickly adapt to the changing needs of our users and meet their demands faster.Ģż

What we have done

Undergraduate course pages are the meeting point for many different sources of data at the university. Some of this is descriptive content, some is driven by entry requirement, programme structure and other details.

Previously that would have been a case of manually building and entering information ‘by hand’ into web pages. But this was an opportunity to take a different approach. We combined the many data points of the University into a single consumable application programming interface (API) service via a series of microservices. We call this service Ģżbased on a many-headed serpent in Greek mythology.Ģż

We also created ā€œā€ – this is a new page delivery service that prioritises page render and delivery speeds.

An early system diagram, drawn in a meeting via the medium of MS Paint.

A more refined diagram of the microservice infrastructure used to create undergraduate course pages.

What does it mean?Ģż

In plain English and away from our geeky terms (), microservices are a software development technique that allows high scalability. It means that demanding services can be deployed using smaller, more flexible, services in multiple servers to enhance performance while minimising the impact of other services. This is hard to achieve with a single, large monolithic service – such as a large single content management system (CMS) like SitePublisher.ĢżĢż

It also means that Paperboy allows us to deliver pages rapidly to a global audience (pages literally load quicker); allowing improved search engine rankings and more importantly, forging a better brand experience.

Focus on your services, not your servers

After much consideration, we also adopted a cloud platform to build, host and run OneWeb services. This infrastructure has been designed for scalable application deployment, and a DevOps platform for continuous integration and continuous deployment in line with agile methodology. We have also defined a defect management and release process designed by our quality assurance (QA) engineer via Atlassian JIRA Cloud to log, work upon, manage and report QA and release status.

What problem are we trying to solve?

As mentioned above, our processes, organisation, applications and infrastructure should be nimble enough to swiftly adapt to changing user needs and meet their demands faster.Ģż

We also know that like many other complex organisations, our university has a significant problem with duplicate and erroneous data.

Our current web content management system (SitePublisher), although robust, is largely overburdened by surplus features and has become bloated. This bloat makes rapid development difficult and distracts from the simple need to deliver webpages at speed.

What can be done about it?

We can lift content-that-is-data (such as fees, or admission information) away from marketing information creating a single point of truth for information. Paperboy is a lightweight system that focuses on page delivery and nothing more. It means that it allows performance to be the “entire picture” and returning developer agility.

It also means that end-to-end applications are built-in months, rather than years. Because we need to move fast, we must deliver new business capabilities in days, not weeks. We must also provision and scale our system resources. That requires a big change to how we do things, both to build future-proof applications at scale, and to change our culture. Weā€™ll do the latter by building an inclusive multi-disciplinary team based on function,Ģż not department. This ties in beautifully with one of our principles – ā€œfix? Not fightā€.Ģż

Why this is important

From a content point of view, separation and curation of data are essential to equalise the information we present as an institution. This separation also allows content writers to focus on marketing the courses without the need to collect, confirm and sanitise data that is held separately.

We must be at the forefront of delivering a user-centric, omnichannel digital experience where users can find open, precise and up-to-date information about our university, be inspired, engage and enrol. Inspired users become evangelists for our institution, giving us a clear advantage over our competition.

What else have we learned

Good data means good products!Ģż

After probing the University’s data repositories, we learned that as an institution we need better ways to store and maintain the data we hold. The good news is that there is a separate project underway, which OneWeb will join up with, for data information.Ģż

Less is more

Another important learning point for us all is not to be intimidated when replacing an extensive system like SitePublisher with a simple application that’s a few hundred lines of code – more often than not, less is more.

New approaches give us a competitive advantage

We also trying new technologies and methodologies to give the University a competitive advantage and be able to compete in a crowded market. But as we all know, change is messy, and delivery can be messier. So challenging the status quo, adapting to new ways of thinking and working, and doing it all quickly is no easy thing!Ģż

What are the next steps

We will provide better, more sustainable data warehouses and interfaces all in collaboration with iSolutions. We will also be iterating and improving our data API service.Ģż

We will improve, iterate and in some places replace parts of our page delivery system, Paperboy, to provide better longevity and adoption.

And we’ll continue to deliver products based on our roadmap and leverage the platform to increase user engagement by means of machine learning, artificial intelligence, cognitive services based on the needs of our users and testing.Ģż

We are only scratching the surface of what technology can deliver for our University.

Thank you #1

Iā€™d like to thank Jon Reader and Madhu Santhanam for their epic support when writing this article.

Thank you #2

Thanks go to all colleagues who worked hard and collaborated with us to help us move at speed so we can launch on time. Especially iSolutions folks!ĢżĢż

As we launch our first services, we will continue to undertake testing and research where we can, and respond to feedback on our site, making improvements to meet user needs and improve functionality.

ĢżIf you have any feedback, or would like more information on what we did, how or why – get in touch at J.D.Lineker@southampton.ac.uk.Ģż

Imagine a world where our course (programme) pages are easy to understand and benchmark well against competitors and existing course pages.

Imagine a world where user needs are brought together with university policies, rules and goals, to create joined up experiences that help our users to do what they want to do instead of confuse them.

Okay, you get the gist – as the financial year draws to a close, so too does phase one of OneWeb. It has been short (we officially started in April), relentless and, it would be fair to say, not without its challenges. Nevertheless, we have delivered what we promised – in a very short space of time!

Thank you

Before I go any further a few thank yous are due to all who contributed to this phase. First and foremost: my team.

This team is tough and resilient – and they rose to every challenge along the way. The one consistent thing about change or transformation projects is that you’ll encounter issues and difficulties. This is perfectly natural, but can breed uncertainty. The challenge for us has been to maintain our focus on delivering genuine value and working through problems without getting bogged down. We kept going despite the inherent difficulties.

Thanks also to our stakeholders: the and members who have been looking at ways of helping us and navigating through many of the Universityā€™s processes and internal complexities.

And of course a very big thank you to all colleagues who worked very hard to help us meet short deadlines despite being very stretched themselves. We know it wasnā€™t easy, and we really appreciate it. Without you, our job would not have been possible!

Hereā€™s a summary of what the last few weeks of delivery have been like.

OneWeb Financial Year 1

The main focus of this financial year was around the delivery of our universityā€™s key product pages for the undergraduate (UG) journey. It wasnā€™t the only thing we addressed as part of the UG journey – many of you contributed to our understanding, either through workshops, interviews, design sprint, or the meetings that helped us with some of the nuances around the journey.

We also made time to deliver a couple of significant discoveries around Postgrad Taught (PGT) user journey and Research, with main focus on REF since it is a university strategic priority. So quite a lot in a short space of time.

For now, let me update you on the UG course pages and what are the plans prior to launchā€¦

UG Course Pages: what are the problems we are trying to solve?

We wrote about issues with duplication, information architecture, governance, and compliance (e.g. CMA), but when we started a few months ago we had very conflicting pieces of information about how many programmes we actually offer and who is accountable for them. So the first thing we did was a comprehensive audit of the content we had, how it was distributed and how it was performing. This in itself was a valuable piece of work for the University.Ģż

When designing solutions, we started with a real paired-back version of a course page, initially as basic wireframes for the content, which through several iterations, became a designed prototype that our developer used to build the page. By the end of April we had a minimum viable product (MVP) which was used to complete the first round of testing with prospective students. By this point, we already knew that the key facts tested well with users. We also found out further details that users would like to see on the existing UoS website and competitor sites.Ģż

New key facts section

Since then, weā€™ve completed (pretty much every couple of weeks). We talked to users about structure, navigation and generally how they consume the content. More importantly, we observed how they searched for and used the content to complete the tasks they needed to do.

Our research tells us that people are often unsure about the information we (and competitors) provide when interacting with universities. This can result in people not applying for the right course, or applying to a course that they have no chance of getting on because the entry requirements or grades are not clear. In addition, because they do not understand all the terminology at that point, theyā€™re also missing some vital information about the awards we offer, the location of the course, options and more.

What weā€™re doing about it

So, in creating a new design of the course pages, we are trying to remove all the barriers we may inadvertently put in place when users compare and find the courses they would like to apply for. For universities, managing complex legislation and associated compliance issues presents challenges when delivering digital services. Itā€™s no stretch to say that our own internal processes are contributory to some of the usability issues we found, and as a result this has also led to inconsistencies in information. This is something this particular phase has highlighted in a significant way.

Our course page evolution April to June 2019

But letā€™s be clear, these problems are not unique to Southampton. Universities around the world are exploring how can they simplify admission information and compliance issues for users. And there is a real challenge tackling legislation, policy and rules in a consumable and accessible way for users.

Why this is important

As a result of only a few monthsā€™ hard work, we now have a digital product (aka course page) that users can navigate, scan and retrieve information from with ease. And itā€™s a well-tested product.

In total we completed over 25 hours of user testing with prospective students:

• All prospective students in testing commented on the clear and simple design and layout. Here’s Liam on the importance of simple and clean design.

• They like the Key Facts box which allows easy comparison with other courses.
• They found that the concise text and improved use of white space makes it easier to scan and retrieve the most relevant information.
• Left-hand menu is coherent and improves navigation.
• The design improves accessibility.

An example undergraduate course page

What else are we doing?

The scope for this phase was to complete all UG course pages. These will be launched in September. During the summer, we will be setting up some drop-in sessions for you to come and see the finished product. These will be informal and any of you are welcome to pay us a visit.

If you would like to , we will drop you a note when these take place.

But our work is not done. This is only the beginning of a very busy multi-year delivery.

Step one was to reduce content, simplify the design and improve usability – done. Step two is to interweave rich content (videos, pictures and much more) to encourage exploration of secondary user needs. This is where things get interesting and where we incorporate the learnings from our work on the . And any existing live pages will now be continuously curated to ensure they meet user needs.

What have we learned so far

Some of the key insights from our initial delivery phase include:

Taking a human and digital first approach

Itā€™s not only important to focus on how we might make it easier for a machine to consume and crawl our information (e.g. Google search), but also how we might make it easier for humans to read and use our information. There is potential for us to do both.

Bridging the gap between content and coding

Instead of working in separate teams, we have found we work best when content designers, developers and user researchers come together as a multi-disciplinary team to test and design future approaches.

There is value in small bites

We know there is a lot of complexity in this space and because of this it is important to start small and iterate. We think there will be some key opportunities that are small in scope but could deliver significant value.

Parting words

There is a lot to do, however, we have already seen the value of bringing together people from diverse roles, skill sets and subject matter expertise.

In the next few weeks we will further define best practice principles and ways of working and we plan on giving you more opportunities to get in touch with us and be involved.

So to conclude, the last few months have been a taster of all there is to come.

• Did we think this was ever going to be simple? No.
• Did we work collectively and respectfully with colleagues to achieve it? Yes.
• Is there still room for improvement? Absolutely.

We can always do better, and this is exactly what weā€™re striving to do.

As always, we would love to hear from you. If you would like more information, or track progress, please get in touch.

So… what does a user researcher do?

Our OneWeb user researchers fulfil several roles for our teams. They are here to help our teams understand:

• who the users of our services are and what they need from the service. This is because if weā€™re to build great services, we need to truly empathise with our users.
• whatā€™s the problem the user is trying to solve, what goal are they trying to achieve? How can we support them to achieve their goal?
• whether the solution weā€™re looking to provide works well and how it can be better

User research is invaluable and it helps decide:

• if we should build/release something at all,
• what that something should be and
• how it should work.

The user has the final say

Weā€™ve stopped thinking we know everything. Instead of assuming we’re always right, weā€™ve adopted an approach where our decisions are increasingly based on insights. Weā€™re listening to our users more than ever and they inform the direction in which we move.

What the users really get to see. From .

User research shows us how the things we create will fit into users lives. It also gives us insight into the language people use and how they view the world. It helps us understand the problems in their lives theyā€™re trying to solve, the goals theyā€™re trying to achieve, and how our creations can help solve those problems or complete their tasks.

There is also the question of what weā€™re testing when we do research: weā€™re testing our designs, we are not testing our users. The user doesnā€™t pass or fail, the design does.

This is really important when we come to think about the products weā€™re creating and the language we use.

And this brings me nicely to the user testing we carried out last week.

Undergraduate usability testing

The first part of our delivery is elements of the mammoth user journey: ā€˜Become an Undergraduate Studentā€™. Nick, our Lead User Researcher, and the team dug deeper to help us understand how prospective undergraduates:

• go about shortlisting universities and courses
• use the Universityā€™s website to find course information
• use course page content to compare courses and inform their decision to (or not to) apply
• feel about the new Minimum Viable Product (MVP) course page design that the OneWeb team have developed.

This is the first version of a new course page template designed by the OneWeb team. It’s a white-label prototype.

Here are 5 things that we learned from the tests:

The user journey is complex

The user journey refers to the sequence of events and steps that a prospective undergraduate student will take in deciding where to apply to go to university. This includes the process of picking a course, researching and shortlisting potential universities, and making a final selection to include in a UCAS application.

Although there was some consistency in how users approached this task, the research suggests that the user journey is complex and non-linear, with many start and end points, such as the many third-party resources that help prospective students to select courses.

Course pages need to help users to complete specific tasks

Prospective students described their need to make quick comparisons with other courses on their shortlist. We can help them to do this by providing easier access to basic comparison information (such as entry requirements, fees etc), a good course overview and concise and engaging information about specific course modules.

Secondary requirements includes practical information about the campus, internships, scholarships, access to teaching staff.

MVP design – are we on the right track?

Yes we are! All of the users we spoke to preferred the MVP course page design to the existing website. They liked that it was clean and uncluttered, allowing them easy access to the most important bits of the information they needed to compare courses. They particularly liked the bold summary in the page header, and found the other headings easy to understand and navigate.

The presentation of course module information was the subject of much discussion. Without a shadow of a doubt, we have an important design challenge in finding the appropriate amount of detail for course modules, as well as the most enticing way to describe them.

General navigation problems

We have always known that the existing site has issues around navigation and how users find the information they need. There are many reasons for it, primarily due to legacy issues, vast amounts of content, and problems with search engine optimisation.

As expected, the tests also helped to identify other more general usability issues with the existing website. For example, several participants had problems navigating around the site and finding appropriate course information. Others found that, once they had chosen to explore other areas of the site, they struggled to find their way back to information they were originally interested in.

Clear navigation is an important part of the usability of a website and how effective it is in helping users to achieve their goals. Further research is planned over the coming weeks to help us improve navigation around the website.

What about international students?

The international students we spoke to had a slightly different, global perspective on deciding where to go to university.

As with domestic students, entry requirements are key. They describe international entry requirements as being more complex and having to do more research to understand what is required of them.

The starting point of the journey is different. Often international students will be considering multiple countries to study in as well as different institutions. They use global resources and rankings to help them narrow their searches and decide on where to apply.

Our international participants were particularly positive about efforts made by universities to help them to understand what life on campus might be like, and the support available, when distances prohibit an open day visit.

They describe some universities as being particularly good at helping to overcome the distance by providing:

• virtual tours
• regular video and social media contact with staff and faculty
• access to student union facilities
• contact with other international students at the organisation, particularly those studying in similar areas

One participant described the resulting ā€˜connectednessā€™ as a key factor in selecting her firm choice of university.

So whatā€™s next?

This is a really exciting time. The direction weā€™re moving in is becoming inevitably more digital and evidence-based in order to be as user-centric as we can. Weā€™re facing many challenges and a good amount of user research will enable us to take the OneWeb programme from strength to strength.

This was the first part of our degree course pages iteration. We will continue testing and iterating our product by getting live feedback from our users on a frequent basis.

If you would like to attend one of our forthcoming show and tells, . Thank you for reading!

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: ā€œWeā€™re building better course pages, hereā€™s how you can helpā€. Ģż

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, Ģżby 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 Ģż
• Understand usersā€™ needs and gain a deeper understanding following the stakeholdersā€™ 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 pageĢż

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

– HEFCE course pageĢż

• RAD – stands for Radical design – completely different than what we currently do and heavily utilises the persona work developed Ģżby 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.Ģż

– RAD course pageĢż

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. Thereā€™s just no parallel to spending time with real users. Ģż
• There are problems that are never anticipated. Again, perceived need could be completely different from actual need.Ģż
• 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 didnā€™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. Thereā€™s a bunch of things we would have liked to include in this Alpha version, but didnā€™t have time to. Hereā€™s some things weā€™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 Ģż
• 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, Ģżas well as completing some of our testing that is already in-flight, and some that requires more of a deep-dive research approach.

So Ģżfor our findings from testing. In addition, if you missed our Show and Tells, you can access theĢżpresentation 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 blogĢżand 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 weā€™ll be sharing everything weā€™ve learned. Weā€™ll keep our cards close to our chests until then – donā€™t want to spoil the big reveal! Thereā€™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 byĢżĢż“Ē²ŌĢż

The remote study is still collecting responses: at time of writing our quota is 80% full. Once itā€™s at 100%, Rosie and Needee from Institutional Research (IR) will be doing a full analysis and weā€™ll use this to inform the next steps – the learning and doing doesnā€™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 weā€™ve done in the build up to Alpha. Weā€™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 weā€™ve learnt

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

What weā€™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 .

Donā€™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 pilotā€™s data. Weā€™ll be using this to take stock of where we are and make sure we stay aligned to our True North,Ģżas we move on to the next stage.

Maybe looking to come to an open day?

Or perhaps getting to do something youā€™ve always dreamt about?

Exploring new skills? ø£Ąū×Åʬing your independence?

Which university course page do you remember looking at?

Whatever our prospective students are after, theyā€™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 usersā€™ expectations of where course pages would be found
• To find out what ā€˜naturalā€™ 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 – studentsā€™ 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 canā€™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.ĢżThere is a lot to do and we have recruited participants via YouthSite. This build wasnā€™t without its challenges, but we got there eventually.

A snippet from our online survey in UzerZoomĢż

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, theyā€™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 theyā€™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 ²¹²Ō»åĢżhow 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. Weā€™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.

Weā€™re very keen to share the results with you in our Ģżon 3 July. Bookings are first come, first served, and with only a few places left we will be closing it soon. Donā€™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:

ā€œIf 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 wonā€™t know if youā€™re sailing in the right direction.Ģż

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?!ā€ –Ģż

“There’s content in them thar hills.”
³§“Ē³Ü°ł³¦±š:ĢżĢż“Ē²ŌĢż

Thank you for reading.

What weā€™ve done

Governance can be a hard sell, so this week I wanted to share some of the practical thinking about how weā€™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 weā€™re achieving our objectives

What weā€™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 facultiesā€™ 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 nobodyā€™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 weā€™ve learnt

Governance

• communication is the single biggest way to improve governance. People working in silos often donā€™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, weā€™re not taking it for granted. Ģż

What weā€™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

Weā€™re creating dummy pages to allow for user journeys and testing via our prototype website.ĢżWeā€™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 weā€™re gearing up for tests next week. We need to build many surveys in our testing platform and these will be administered online. ĢżWeā€™re also carrying out card sort and tree tests on the navigation with our target audience in schools.

Thatā€™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 ā€˜the content design revolutionā€™ is a bit dramatic. Although it isnā€™t quite a revolution, itā€™s still a good way of grabbing your attention! ā€‹Ģż

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 Ģż

One of the biggest issues with the website is that itā€™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. Ģż

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 donā€™t want to keep highlighting problems without ever finding a solution. There is a solution, a tried and tested one!

Remember the user needs workshopsĢżfrom last year? Weā€™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 weā€™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 havenā€™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, weā€™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 theyā€™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, thatā€™s brilliant! If they need instructions, thatā€™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. Weā€™re very keen to show the importance of content design once we have metrics to compare before and after.

Show & tell

As weā€™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.Ģż

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.Ģż

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

Thatā€™s it for this week. Have a good weekend!

In my previous post, we concentrated on our projectā€™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 – itā€™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 weā€™re selling

ā€œEvery product has a unique personality and it is your job to find itā€ – 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 userā€™s experience.

Weā€™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, weā€™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. Theyā€™re truly outstanding and we constantly refer back to them. Itā€™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 weā€™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 youā€™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 sprintā€™s tasks sometimes take longer than you think. The user testing threw a few curve balls our way, but weā€™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. Ģż

What weā€™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 ĢżĢż

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 itā€™s important to time-box these activities so you donā€™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. Thatā€™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. Itā€™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 weā€™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 weā€™ve covered, .

You can also access the presentation slides here.ĢżAs 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 whatā€™s good for the (end) user. Ģż
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. Weā€™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 weā€™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 weā€™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 weā€™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 colleaguesā€™ appetite for change and to also think about a content-led approach in a broader way.

This is just the start. Weā€™ve got some big ambitions for the project over the coming weeks.

Thank you for reading.