UX Lead, Higher Education
I led UX research on a project for a Russell Group university while working as UX Lead within a contracted agency. The brief was to audit the university’s student-facing digital systems, with a focus on understanding how different student groups experienced administrative processes across the academic lifecycle.
The work centred on developing a set of personas and experience maps representing five distinct student groups, alongside usability testing of the existing university website. The aim was not simply to evaluate interfaces, but to surface patterns in how students encountered institutional systems, language, and processes.
My role focused on research design, facilitation, and synthesis. I led a series of whiteboarding workshops with students and administrative staff, using these sessions to capture lived experiences of key administrative journeys and identify points of friction, confusion, and breakdown. The material generated through these workshops was translated into a set of experience maps that were iteratively refined and reviewed with the project team.
In parallel, I led a programme of remote usability testing across four participant groups: current students, prospective students, faculty members, and academics from other institutions. The testing provided a complementary view of how institutional assumptions surfaced through the website’s structure, content, and interaction patterns.
Findings from the research were synthesised into a set of shared artefacts, including personas, experience maps, and a short edited film drawn from usability sessions. These outputs were presented to senior stakeholders at the university as part of a wider programme of internal work. The video, in particular, was noted for its ability to convey the emotional and practical challenges students faced when interacting with existing digital services.
The project contributed to a larger internal initiative within the university, supporting discussion and decision-making around future digital strategy and service design.
