Service: Online Application

December 28th, 2008

The brief was to develop an online application service that will improve current recruitment process for Northumbria University’s School of design. Initial research has identified that the current quality of experience of the applicant was subject to a number of unpredictable bottlenecks and opaque policy barriers. In additiona, the standard university online application does not account for the production of visual evidence together with the written application. In past applications, there has been a lack of consistency in the range and type of work submitted. Having a fixed format of portfolio submission in the system has solved this problem and enabled tutors to make a more informed judgment.

There are three main users of the service: the applicant, the admissions tutor and the admissions administrator. The service enables the applicant to submit an online written and visual application. The applicant is able to track and be informed once a decision has been made. The admissions tutor will be informed once an application has been submitted. The tutor will review the application and submit a decision through the system. The admissions administrator will be then be able to track and keep a record of the applications. The system will display the status of each application and will prompt the administrator when an applicant has been accepted.

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Service: Expert Directory

December 27th, 2008

CfDR undertook a user-needs study in relation to the ‘Research and Consultancy’ section of Northumbria University’s website. In support of a planned redevelopment, the University required a stakeholder/user-needs study. This user-needs study would aim to identify key features and resources required by the internal stakeholders and external user groups. This would inform the way in which content would be structured and delivered in the new ‘Research and Consultancy’ resource. Due to the timescale and budgetary constraints of the project would not allow for preliminary research to be conducted with real end-users so instead the design team elected to work with a large group of stakeholders as ‘surrogate users’. The focus group conducted with these surrogate users identified key motives of different user groups when accessing the website. As a result, six key features were identified and recommendations were made to the web development team on their specifications. These specifications were put into place through the Northumbria’s new Expert Directory resource (see below).

An academic paper has been written about this project and can be found here.

User groups and their use motives

Expert Directory website

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