The University has recently improved its public-facing website for the online prospectus to give prospective students a better experience. Digital Technology Services worked closely with Marketing to achieve this and it involved underpinning work in Sitecore, Biztalk, SITS and Achiever. There has been some great feedback about the result.

 

Justin Cole, Director of Marketing:

“I wanted to specifically highlight your contribution to the delivery of the new online prospectus. This project wouldn’t have been a success without your individual contribution. You should be proud of your work and the resulting output.”

Nicola Rawlins, Director of Admissions and UK Student Recruitment:

“Just had a quick browse on the OLP and just wanted to say a VERY BIG well done, it looks great and is a real step change. Video content is great and very well targeted, love the links to the staff profiles however being the person I am I just have to recognise the pain and effort required to get those modules listed…. the majority will never know the amount of work/this took but I love the fact that they are there!”

 

What’s changed?

We have improved the Online Prospectus (OLP) page design based around 3 user centred principles:

• Making sure we offer the most relevant information for the user – in terms of search result, content that adds value to the course offer, removing content that is too generic, creation of relevant student stories, making sure all content is up to date
• Improving on page usability and navigation – the target audience associates experience on the page with quality of the product. Improving the ability for users to filter search results. Making sure the user can find what they need easily. Improve in-page navigation and cross-linking of supporting content. Alleviate as much scrolling as possible.
• Keeping the experience brief and to the point – Clean, easy to use design. Users don’t want to read lots of content on the page. Users prefer to see key information summarised highlighted. Highlight content through bullet lists and featured information. Users want to see key course information at the top of pages.

To achieve this we needed to make changes to some of the processes we used and the information that was included in the prospectus entries

We have:

• remodelled how information is displayed on the OLP in order to feed the information directly from SITS.
• Streamlined processes to facilitate automation of information where possible e.g. Professional Statutory and Regulatory Body (PSRB) data and associated logos.
• Introduced new subject area groupings for the OLP and incorporated these across SITS/Achiever (CRM)/OLP for consistency.
• Identified a definitive list of courses currently being recruited to and requiring marketing in the 17/18, 18/19 and 19/20 academic years.
• Produced 441 individual prospectus summaries.
• Created two years of entry to enable users  to  select  their preferred year of study  and separated out attendance mode resulting in a total of 2,079 entries on the new OLP.
• Created both an academic and student view video for all full time UG courses – which will all be live prior to clearing. Academic    Andy Price, Politics
• Student   – Rhianna Coote International tourism management
• Here are some that have already been produced.
• Added a link to course leader staff profiles (where available) to all full time UG and PG courses

The way DTS and Marketing worked together

• Collaborating to create the solution we needed to deliver the design. We jointly created some user stories, the functional specification of the individual components and the acceptance criteria for each component (essentially designing together)
• Close daily working in terms of co-located, collaborative working – designing, developing, building, testing and delivering individual components. This included daily stand-ups, weekend working, Bug fixing, Quality Assurance (QA), User Acceptance Testing (UAT).

Marketing and DTS working together on the OLP

Input from different teams across DTS

A number staff across different teams in DTS worked to deliver the new OLP. Here’s a summary of the work was involved:

DTS Development & Quality Team (Kevin Eagle, Paul Smith, Chris Peck, Paul Haynes & Tom Knight-Markiegi):

• Closely guiding and supporting a 3^rd Party supplier with the implementation of the User Interface (UI) redesign for the new OLP implementation.
• A major redesign of the data schema used within Sitecore to accommodate new SITS data structures.
• A custom data extraction & transformation facility to retrieve the necessary data from SITS.
• A new set of web services to transfer extracted SITS data directly into Sitecore (including data for course occurrences, course modules, course application routes, fees & Professional Statutory Regulatory Body (PSRB) accreditation data).
• A Sitecore data roll-forward facility for new marketing years.
• Low level detailed testing of all DTS provided features.
• Provision of a technical lead role to external suppliers.
• Distributed source code management & co-ordination.
• Implementation of an automated build and deployment chain across SHU Sitecore environments.

DTS Enterprise Applications Team (Shirley Flynn & Sarah Cleverley):

• Setup and managed the OLP deliverables in SHU JIRA.
• SHU JIRA was the master source of OLP deliverables with 3^rd parties, DTS, Marketing and Planning accessing, progressing and tracking SHU JIRA tickets for the OLP.
• Managed daily conference calls between all parties involved in the work took place to provide progress updates and flag any blockers.
• Worked closely with the Project Manager from Planning, to plan and manage the release across Corporate Affairs, Digital Technology Services and the 3^rd parties through to completion.
• Planning and managing Precedent Systems deployments of the OLP release to the Sitecore UAT and Live systems hosted in the Azure with Precedent’s resource based in Bulgaria.
• Mando Group Ltd (Based in Liverpool and London) and Front End Developer Contractor (employed by Marketing) – Liaised with developers regarding any issues identified and facilitated issue resolution across 3rd parties, DTS and Marketing.
• Provided Marketing with guidance on testing approach.
• Deploying and testing changes to the CRM (Achiever) to support the work for OLP and managing this change across the Achiever environments. Supported the end users with regression testing of Achiever.

DTS Online & Teaching Applications Team (Jenny Ludlam):

• Uploading subject area data into SITS for each course included on prospectus from the spreadsheet supplied by Marketing
• Initial upload of marketing summary text into SITS for 2017/18 and 2018/19 academic years then a further upload for 2019/20 at rollover, from spreadsheets supplied by Marketing
• Deriving and populating a marketing flag to indicate which occurrences of each course were recruiting for 2017/18 and 2018/19 academic years.
• Rollover of marketing flag to indicate which occurrences of each course were recruiting for 2018/19 and 2019/20 academic years.
• Copying entry requirement data from UAT to live SITS environment
• Upload of PSRB prospectus text from previous prospectus database into SITS

DTS Infrastructure Support (Dave Hewitt & Paula Groves):

• Identifying and resolving infrastructure issues experienced by DTS developers and 3^rd parties.
• Providing support to DTS and 3^rd parties during the deployment of the release across the environments.

DTS Security (Mark Somerset & Michael Gilmour):

• Identifying and resolving VPN related issues experienced by 3^rd parties.