The Design Sprints are producing some brilliant ideas, most of which are being voted highly and making it into the prototypes for testing with prospective students, current students, and staff.
To the people who have taken time to comment on these – a big thank you! For those who haven’t, you can still add your comments and we encourage you to have your say. Positive, negative, or neutral, it will all be read and taken into consideration.
We should also take the time to say thank you again to those who have attended a Design Sprint – there would be no ideas to test without you.
How will the ideas and feedback from testing impact the new website?
The tender process for a new Content Management System is well underway. A decision will be made in July. This will kick off the process of creating new content, new designs, and all of the development work that will help to build a brand new-and-improved website.
The ideas that people vote for and comment on during the Design Sprint process will be part of the new website creation process. For example, staff profiles will be created with your comments in mind. And we now have a great insight into what people need from their profile (and it varies dramatically).
The insight gathered from Design Sprints will feed into work on the website’s Information Architecture (how content is structured), content modeling (defining elements for each type of content), content writing, design, and development.
Are there any common themes that will inform the new website?
We consistently hear certain words and phrases from people attending Design Sprints that make it clear there are some common themes to consider when creating the new website.
“Personalisation”
Automatic customisation of content, design, and user experience to better meet the needs of a website visitor. Examples include learning which subjects a visitor is interested in, what kind of events, or pre-filling form information like the country based on the IP address.
“Tagging”
Adding a tag to a piece of content so that it may be related to similar content and then displayed as a group of related content to visitors who are interested in that subject. For example, we could tag content like news, events, courses, and research staff with ‘sustainability’ and display them on a subject page for that term.
“Single source of truth”
Creating an item of content in one place and re-using it, rather than recreating it. This ensures consistent and quality.
“Student voice”
Letting students do the talking when it comes to telling the world about our courses, events, and so on.
“On brand”
Attendees have discussed the importance of following the brand guidelines.
“Sense of community”
How we tell people about the strong sense of staff and student community on campus.
What’s next?
We are building a new university website. This will incorporate the ideas from the 20+ design sprints run throughout 2018 and 2019. Look out for more design sprints in the future!