The University of Southampton

Challenge

A major product for the university - course pages - needed a complete redesign. Tight deadline and 400 undergraduate and 700 postgraduate course webpages to update as part of the OneWeb Transformation Project.

Solution

In beta phase - create content to align to a designed and tested template to improve user experience of courses pages to increase applications.

What I did

• Supported the implementation of a data driven solution for key elements of pages – reducing massive manual input for future updates, improving efficiencies and reducing risk of users finding out of date information
• Ensuring core user needs were met, such as quickly finding entry requirements
• Re-writing large volumes of complex content to be simple, digestible, accessible descriptions of courses
• Championed for the user group of international students, where English was not a native language, to ensure readability and comprehension standards were upheld

The impact

The course pages were the initial release as part of a digital transformation project for the university. Advocating for content design through every stage of the process meant the team secured internal buy-in through education and working transparently.

Switching from manual input to API for data based content, improved efficiencies and accuracy of a core digital product.

In the first release of undergraduate course pages, within one month of go live, page interactions increased by 79% and click-through rate increased by 195%.

Comparison of old course page design and new

Comparison of hidden entry requirement core content in old design and prominent placement in new design on undergraduate course page. The most important function for users was to quickly understand if their grades met the entry requirements. Issues: complex, too much information, hard to find and led to phone enquiries.