We are making it faster and easier for you to launch apps and be able to get support and information on 28 July 2021.

The student’s homepage is the most popular page on our website. It has had just under two million page views during 2020.

In the last twelve months, the vast majority of the traffic to the student’s homepage has been to launch four apps or dynamic content (content that is not permanently on the page).

DesktopTabletMobile
My Dundee45%49%23%
Email33%30%40%
eVision9%8%17%
Library3%6%1%
Dynamic 9%6%13%
Total99%99%94%
Clicks on the student’s homepage during 2020

Conversely, on desktop, the links under the search bar accounted for just 0.3% of the clicks. On all three devices, the vast majority of traffic doesn’t scroll past the search bar. All of the links under the search bar are accessible from the menu or by search.

This data tells us that the top task that students come to this page for is to launch a few apps. Therefore, for the migrated page, that has been the focus. The quicker that people can achieve their goal, the quicker they can get on with what they need to.

Load time for students homepage on old site is 612ms
Load time on the old page
Load time for students homepage on new site is 382ms
Load time on the new page

Top tasks is a concept developed by Gerry McGovern, which is summed up nicely by Peter Horsman from Microsoft.

“What do our customers come to do on our site? Great question. It’s surprising how many different answers/opinions you’ll hear. At Microsoft, I have used Top Tasks with incredible success—often increasing conversion rates by more than 100% while improving customer satisfaction. Use Top Tasks and get real results, fast.”

Peter Horsman, Senior Digital Marketing Lead, Microsoft Cloud + AI

As Danny (Content Manager) mentioned in his last blog post

The information architecture of traditional organisational websites often forces users to navigate and understand the organisational hierarchy to access crucial information like policies. Unwittingly they make it difficult for users by publishing the information in silos across the website.

Tackling policies and corporate information on the University website

We have been migrating content to structured content, such as guides like “Change your password” or “Connect to eduroam wifi” which are task-focused and easily searchable from a search engine or our website search.

We have included the most popular student-focused guides and a link to view more student support guides. We have also included an information panel relating to Coronavirus and a call-to-action link to view all student support guides.

Personalised content will appear on the student homepage in the coming months. By ensuring that this page is highly focused we will now have the ability to show dynamic content that changes throughout the year that is relevant to specific groups of users.

We will continue to monitor the traffic and clicks on this page and adjust elements based on data to keep the page top task-focused.

Preview of the new current students homepage