We used much of the work from the discovery phase to understand and map out the ‘Become an Undergraduate student’ journey to enable our prospective students to get what they need out of our digital products and services.

Creating a set of core user needs

We have been working in collaboration with many stakeholders across the University on insights and findings. We used a variety of data sources to consolidate all the user needs. These included information from external organisations that hold sector reports. We also used data from our university. These came from departments such as Institutional Research, Marketing, International Office, UK Outreach and Student Recruitment, Admissions, Student Services, as well as our own team.

An example of prospective students behavioural flow��

So, what is a challenge session’s goal?

Can I offer some assumptions? Credit:

The overall goal of this session was to validate and agree to our understanding of what our prospective students need in regard to information before they even think that they might want to come to any university. We wanted our stakeholders to tell us if this information is incorrect, and if so – why.

What we did

We shared our information in advance. There was so much of it, so we only sent key information.

On the day, we enlarged the user journeys to a set of big posters and hung them on the wall. These illustrated our understanding, based on the data, of what we feel are the needs of prospective students.

Time to show and tell – thanks Katrina

We wanted to understand what our users go through when they are considering their education, what is their consideration process, what sort of information they look for, and identify typical actions. This allows us to paint a picture of characterising patterns of behaviour, and identify their problems and expectations.

Storytelling

To draw together all our findings into a simple, digestible way is always a challenge. This requires a lot of sketching, post-it notes and loads of coffee!

We need to define and focus on the information we know is important. The mismatch between organisational needs and users’ expectations is a perfect start to our user journey and the service design challenge. We can start to visualise the current service and identify ways to connect the business and user needs. For example, some users are searching for our products and services using terminology that is inconsistent with how we internally refer to things. We can see at the moment in how we name some degree courses. We are not our users, so we should stop using a subjective language.

Challenge session outcome

There are many different opinions, but what we wanted to get out of the day is an agreement of what the user needs for prospective students are (whether international or domestic). Now that we have the blueprint with some minor iterations we can actually start prototyping content and begin to plan out how we work with the University.

Having validated user needs will also help us create a service map that illustrates interaction between university staff and users showing online and offline activities as part of the process. Making insights visual allows everyone in our university to be part of the end-to-end process. It offers an opportunity to step out of the single silo focus of departments and raise questions like “why do we do it that way?” or “how does this benefit the end user, staff and our university?”.

The user journey mapping is a way to collaborate on the way forward. It should be used to ignite discussions, questions and prioritise opportunities.

Our findings and tools will be used continuously in the upcoming weeks. It’s exciting to reflect back as so much is happening every week, and see how much we have learned about our prospective students’ world.

We’re looking forward to sharing some more with you in the coming weeks!

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Until the next challenge session, it’s goodbye from the OneWeb team.��Thanks for reading.

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.

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.