The first step: working out what we need to know

The Digital User Experience team was tasked with finding out how news content helps visitors and our university, and if improvements could be made. At the start of the discovery, I was tasked with supporting our excellent user researchers preparing to talk to visitors to news content.

We discussed asking these people about actions news content prompts them to take. I wondered if that was expecting too much of news content. Instead, to ensure we weren鈥檛 overlooking any impacts, I suggested asking: 鈥淐an you remember university news that made an impression on you? What did it make you think or do?鈥�

Our user researchers thought this was a good question. I had a vote of confidence, and our team could cast our net wide as we sought out the value of news.

Content designers instinctively take a step back and question content

What is 鈥榥ews鈥� for you? This was a question I asked digital peers in other universities as we embarked on our quest for a rationale for news content.

While I enjoyed reviewing different approaches in our competitor review, speaking to peers was even more eye-opening. We content designers excel at searching questions. They helped me to find out whether news content鈥檚 right to valuable site space had been questioned 鈥� and how it had proved its worth.

We were learning about opportunities to add more value, as well as the problems with news content.

福利着片y: what content success looks like for the University

One thing I know I brought to the agile discovery 鈥榩arty鈥� as a content designer was my experience in engaging colleagues at the University.

The best content is co-designed with stakeholders who are open-minded about how University goals are met. So helping colleagues to take a step back with me always feels valuable. They seemed to welcome a space to think about their hopes for news content in workshops.

And we were starting to get an idea of what successful news content might look like. First, however, we needed to see what success looked like from the 鈥榦ther side鈥� of the screen.

福利着片y: sharing findings with university colleagues helped them imagine new possibilities

What were people searching for when they came? Where else on our site had they been? And what did they do when they arrived, and next? I loved delving into the data on search intent, behaviour, including scrolling and clicking, and users鈥� journeys to, and away from, news content.

I could see that stakeholders鈥� need for 鈥榥ews鈥� to help people connect with us was not always being met. Sometimes content is used in ways we never intended. Many lower value visits were quick checks of medical news by people self-diagnosing! At its best, 鈥榥ews鈥� is not a cul de sac, but a door.

Presenting such surprising findings to stakeholders helped us all go on a journey together. A discovery is our collective opportunity to completely re-think content to make it more valuable. The culmination was a 3-day workshop to bring everything we found out together.

By the final workshop, I was in my environment

I was the only content designer for the majority of the synthesis workshop. The content design project lead had shown me, again and again, how we add value.

She had gained a deep understanding of existing processes and emerging strategy, and also the possibilities different technologies offer to help improve these. For the final workshop, she would not be there to ask any questions or connect any dots. I had not needed to worry.

By this point, the little voice asking myself why I was in the meeting, and not busily making some source information accessible, had largely gone.

I felt comfortable asking a performance colleague why we were reporting a percentage when the total numbers were so small. I was at ease asking user researchers to tell me more about an interviewee using news to 鈥渓ook for inspiration鈥�.

More than asking questions however, I made a contribution to designing solutions.

Finally, thinking about solutions for the website

In the final discovery workshop I was excited to get stuck into designing possible solutions based on the evidence before us. As content designers, this is what we do.

This time, however, I was helping to design a new process for publishing news content. I was quick, as ever, to take us a step back to an earlier stage than initially sketched. 鈥淲here do the ideas for news come from?鈥�

I was also critiquing, when it was after time to go home, interaction designs for 鈥榥ews鈥�. I was unsure there was evidence for signposting 鈥榣atest news鈥�, given content designers elsewhere signposted the most important 鈥榥ews鈥� content by other criteria.

After all, deciding what is important for the University and visitors to our site is our job, and one that I relish.

With some colleagues from OneWeb I鈥檝e recently completed a discovery (research) project looking at how well our current website meets the needs of prospective international students. We talked to many international students and many internal stakeholders. We also did a complete usability and analytics review of the current site.

The way we as a university view 鈥榠nternational鈥� internally is replicated on our current website. We try to address international user needs through specific, separate pages 鈥� the international index and country pages. We forget to present all the rest of our content in a way that answers our international students鈥� questions and makes them feel like they will belong here. Unintentionally we are creating a sense of exclusion.

International students aren鈥檛 (that) different:

We discovered that our international students share all the same user needs and motivations as our UK students, but some of the information needs to be filtered through a 鈥榬elevance lens鈥� (don鈥檛 just tell me about careers in the NHS, tell me what I can do when I go back to my home country). On top of this, international students have a set of informational needs (visas, arrivals, funding etc.) that are unique to them.

Routes to our university as an international student can be more varied and complicated than for our UK students. Even when using an agent or a partner institution, however, international students cite university websites as the most useful resource in their decision making (). Our prospective international students are using our website just as our UK students are, investigating the course first and then exploring life and practicalities.

So, how is OneWeb going to ensure that every piece of content we create speaks to the needs of our prospective international (and EU) students as well as our UK students?

Better content, starting now:

We鈥檙e starting right now with the new 鈥楲ife in鈥� content. This content looks at our cities, our campuses, our halls of residence and our student communities. For every page we鈥檙e asking:

• have we answered all the key questions that both UK and international students will have?
• have we represented a broad range of students in our imagery?
• have we shown a range of content that will help people from the UK and overseas feel they will belong here?
• have we written in plain English, without assuming any prior knowledge of idioms or abbreviations?
• have we helped all our users, but particularly those from overseas, picture our city, halls and campuses and understand how those elements connect?

For example, our new 鈥榮tudent communities鈥� page now highlights the rich variety of international societies our Students鈥� Union offers, allows users to explore places of worship near our campuses and highlights the thriving entrepreneurial community we have here. We鈥檙e also planning to pull-in stories from our wonderful 鈥樷�� Instagram feed.

Many international students love that the UK has seasons, because they don鈥檛 have them at home. When choosing our campus pictures, therefore, we鈥檙e looking to reflect this and include beautiful pictures of snow and autumn as well as summer.

Spreading and embedding:

There are many teams within OneWeb working on different sections of content. As soon as we had our findings we ran a 鈥樷�� for the whole team so that everyone is now working to a set of guidelines that ensure international user needs are always considered.

And OneWeb aren鈥檛 the only people creating content. It鈥檚 important that we share what we鈥檝e learned about our international users with our marketing and communications colleagues so that all our touchpoints are inclusive.

Being international resonates with UK students too:

“68% of young people in the UK believe international experience and a global outlook are essential for their personal goals.”

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This kind of data tells us that we shouldn鈥檛 be afraid to embed our internationalism in all our content, because our UK students also want to gain skills for a global marketplace.

We鈥檙e actually adding a new page into the 鈥榮tudent life鈥� section of the website that will promote the opportunities we offer all our students, wherever they come from, because we are an international university.

This page, and the community page, have tested really well with prospective students both from the UK and overseas.

A word about language:

As part of our research, I had a brilliant conversation with Dr Jill Doubleday, Senior Teaching Fellow in the University鈥檚 Academic Centre for International Students. Jill is passionate about ensuring our teaching is inclusive and works for everybody, no matter where in the world they come from. I was relieved to hear from her that, whilst there are cultural sensitivities to be aware of (particularly in imagery) the key is writing to the principles of plain English, principles that already lie at the heart of the OneWeb project. The advice was to just keep doing what we鈥檙e doing.

Data 鈥� the final frontier:

Alongside embedding international user needs in all our content, we do have some challenges ahead to meet the specific, practical needs of international students around entry requirement equivalencies, visa information and funding. These issues are ones that OneWeb cannot solve alone; they need a cross-university approach to pull together our data into formats that can feed all our digital content, embedding the data in content wherever it鈥檚 most relevant. With the current challenges of COVID-19 that ambition has had to be put on ice, but I鈥檓 hopeful that in a future blog I鈥檒l be able to return and share how we have cracked it!

Thanks for reading.

If you’d like to know more about international user needs read our

While the University had some understanding of the experience of its prospective postgraduate students, we had no definitive research around this.

We all know that course specifics are important. What we learned is how course pages were critical in ensuring the right outcomes. Here鈥檚 how we found this out:

福利着片ing out about PGT students

Our small team of a delivery manager, a service designer, a content designer, SEO specialist, a business analyst and a user researcher started by getting feedback from university staff on what they understood about PGT students and their motives and needs. They helped us contact current and prospective students from around the world to run in-depth interviews with them.

The first step leading to personas – collating comments and categorising groups

Over the course of 3 weeks we spoke to nearly 60 students from a range of disciplines and countries. From these interviews we created three main – very general archetypes, based on evidence, of the kind of people who want to study at the University of Southampton.

Creating personas helped us to broadly understand groupings of users based on their needs and motivations. These motivations are varied, but were centred around career and academic motivations.听

This tallied with overall views and expected outcomes we had when听 we started, but having data to validate our initial hypothesis was a key objective for discovery. This meant we could plan next steps with real confidence. We also found some regional variations that came into play, along with a different approach for researching PGT compared with undergraduate research.听

Mapping the student journey

To help us understand how the student experience changes over time in terms of engaging with the university, we mapped the PGT experience. We went from the initial point when someone considers postgraduate study through to applying, studying and completing the course.听

Our PGT user journey

We used the stages to frame insight gained from both internal staff and students. The end-to-end journey map helps us understand both the relationship between different stages and to acknowledge the joined-up nature of the end-to-end student journey, from the point of view of the user.

To this, we mapped the user needs we uncovered – things that we interpreted as being important when looking for PGT courses. From these, we then reviewed where we could make the most impact.

What鈥檚 next

We are now planning on improving areas where we feel we can make the most impact – in this case, improving the website. Numerous students told us about the difficulties they had in finding information and working out if a course and the university were right for them.

We’ll soon be gathering stakeholders and experts together to focus on creating and testing optimised PGT course pages to make them easier to find, read and navigate.

We鈥檒l be looking at improving content and design, such as making it clearer what the entry requirements are, what the modules entails and the lecturers鈥� credentials. But we’ll also be bringing to bear the things we learned when creating new undergraduate pages. We鈥檒l be building on the good work and rapid delivery of more effective content, but also doing more with various stakeholders and more widespread trails across faculties.

We won鈥檛 change all 200 PGT course pages at once, but by testing a select group we aim to make it easier for prospective PGT students to find out how the University of Southampton is right for them.

Along with course pages we found a range of areas we could look at improving. The application process itself was seen as good and one suggestion was that while the acceptance emails had lots of good information, other universities were seen as sending acceptances that got them more fired up to start and fully captured the vibe of the university. We also learnt that students want to find out more about what it鈥檚 like to live and study at Southampton.

Next, we鈥檒l look at how we can improve the information students find online, making it clearer to read, easier to find relevant information and to know what to do next. We鈥檒l continue to test iterate our designs based on feedback from students and university staff, who have a wealth of expertise in the area.

P.S: thanks to Jonathan and Rob for the useful thoughts, content and words on this topic.

For readers who might be unaware, during a the team seeks to find out:

• who the users of the potential digital service are,听
• what problems they have, and听
• what can be done to improve the experience for them.听

Clearly “Research” is a huge topic that touches many parts of our university, so in order to make the 福利着片y more manageable we split it into two key areas, Research Excellence Framework (REF) and Research Content.听听

We reported our REF findings in after speaking to many researchers and staff from the various professional services at the University.听

We came up with two hypotheses:

• how to improve Impact Case Studies with a significant Public Engagement element for REF2021
• changes to the identification, creation and reporting on Impact throughout the lifecycle of a research project

In this post we will focus on our work into Research Content, which at the time of writing is still ongoing, but nearly complete.听

The problem we are trying to solve听

So, what do we mean by Research Content? Simply, any online content that contains references to, or is part of, some research being undertaken at the University.听

Our University harbours impactful, highly evaluated and newsworthy research. Yet students, faculty and staff, and members of the public are often unaware of research content that may interest or benefit them.听

OneWeb is exploring ways to expose and communicate academic research at the University effectively and in a way that serves its diverse users – the people who produce, fund, communicate, evaluate, and apply this research.听

Why this is important听

The value of research in the Higher Education sector cannot be understated. The UK is a world leader and research accounts for over 拢1 billion of overseas investment (source: Universities UK).听

Our University is a research-intensive university, and a significant revenue derives directly from research. Research is also vital to maintain the reputational value the university gains from the cutting edge researchers working here.听

What we did

We initially approached the School of Geography and Environmental Sciences (SoGES) to understand how they organise their content, both from a school and research project perspective.听

We then attended the SoGES away day where we gave a presentation about the importance of taking a user-led and consistent approach to creating our digital content. We spoke to many researchers and watched some early-career researchers explain their current research.听听

During the past few weeks we’ve been carrying out an intensive period of user research sessions where we interviewed over 30 people including students, researchers, external funders, content creators, and colleagues in professional services. This helps us to start drawing out a picture, supported with evidence, of their needs and the context they’re in when they look for research-related content.

We also carried out competitor analysis work to understand how our research stacks up against other HE institutions and search engine optimisation (SEO) analysis to identify what people are searching for when they arrive on our research pages. We also looked at the internal systems we use to deliver content to users.听

What we learned听

As we mentioned above, we’re still in the process of synthesising our results. We鈥檙e looking as widely as possible for evidence and will compare what we think we know more widely, but there are a few common themes that are already surfacing across the work:

Researchers and research-focussed students are already creating some compelling useful content, but they鈥檙e not necessarily looking at it in a holistic way. We know it competes for users鈥� attention with other content created by other University colleagues.听

People matter – people search for names (of our researchers, or research groups and projects). It is about individuals and there is a careful balance that needs to be struck with brand reputation of the University as a whole. This is also consistent with the rest of the sector.听

Surfacing relevant content at the right place and time for those who need it is difficult. The burden remains largely on the user to find what they鈥檙e looking for. Many systems and processes in place are making it too difficult to re-use research content across the University digital estate.听

What鈥檚 next听

We’re forming a plan to make meaningful change for users in this area, but our direction of travel is one that involves recommending changes in a number of areas including policy, infrastructure and content delivery.听

Thank you

We鈥檇 like to thank our great collaborators from across the whole of the University, who gave us their time so freely and at short notice.

We enjoyed meeting you, hearing from you and listening to your individual stories. This has helped us shape the next steps and recommendations. We鈥檙e also looking to talk to more of you. More to follow soon.听

Finally, this article would not have been possible without Andrew Larcombe鈥檚 words about the team鈥檚 work and approach