Designing for student experience

I worked as UX Lead on a research project for a Russell Group university, looking at how students experienced its digital services and administrative processes across their journey through the university.

The university wanted to understand the experience of different groups of students, from prospective students through to those already studying there. This meant looking beyond individual websites and interfaces to understand how institutional processes, language and organisational boundaries appeared from a student’s point of view.

I designed and led a series of whiteboarding workshops with students and administrative staff, using them to reconstruct key experiences and identify where things became difficult, confusing or disconnected. I brought this material together into personas and experience maps representing five different student groups, which we reviewed and refined with the project team.

Alongside this, I led a programme of remote usability testing of the university website with current students, prospective students, faculty members and academics from other institutions. This gave us another way of seeing the organisation from the outside: where its structure made sense to the people working within it but became harder to understand when encountered through its digital services.

The research resulted in a set of personas and experience maps, together with a short film I edited from the usability sessions. We presented the work to senior stakeholders as part of a wider programme looking at the university’s digital services. The film was particularly effective because stakeholders could see and hear students encountering the problems we had identified rather than only reading about them in a report.

The work became part of a broader internal discussion about the university’s future digital strategy and how its services might better reflect the student experience.