LONDON UNIVERSITY

Unearthing governance and workflow insights to transform a University’s digital strategy.

Service Design

Research

Digital Strategy

Jun - Sep 2023

The Challenge

The University identified issues with its internal processes, governance and management of their website and it’s content, which was impacting performance, user experience, and ultimately, the it’s role in supporting wider institutional goals.

The Solution

To enable success, the University required an independent partner to bring fresh and unbiased perspectives to explore opportunities for improvement and optimisation. By better understanding their audiences, systems, internal processes and workflows, we were able to provide strategic recommendations and create alignment on future priorities.

The Process

  • Our approach to this project consisted of a detailed discovery phase, uncovering various audience and stakeholder perspectives to ensure solutions could be implemented systemically, and not at surface-level. Research included:

    • 2 Workshops (senior leaders and staff)

    • 5 Expert interviews (workshop follow-up)

    • 6 Interviews with primary audiences.

    • 40 Survey responses to secondary audiences

    • 16 Participants across 2 focus groups

    • 200 Benchmarking survey responses

    • Platform walkthroughs

    These combined insights created a clear evidence base to guide the redesign and ensure it meets both organisational and audience needs.

    • Service Blueprint: Visualised journeys for the 4 key audiences, highlighting challenges and opportunities, which I developed into an interactive prototype for stakeholders.

    • Personas: Brought audiences to life by creating audience profiles summarising goals, needs, challenges, platforms used, and real quotes.

    • Digital ecosystem map: Venn diagram to visualis the systems used across audiences to show the scale of the digital landscape.

    • CMS review: Deep understanding of how the CMS is used, it’s strengths, weaknesses and how staff are trained on it. This established a baseline for technical review by the CTO for a technical a recommendation.

  • We delivered clear, actionable recommendations to guide the University’s digital transformation, including platform options, adoption tools, and a roadmap for a sustainable, user-focused website.

    Visual explorations through mood boards, mock-ups, and best practice reviews inspired new directions, while an Internal Adoption Toolkit outlined methods and process changes to streamline workflows and governance.

    An Innovation Timeline mapped opportunities to integrate emerging technologies, ensuring the site remains future-ready and supports ongoing transformation.

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The Result

The project brought together diverse stakeholder perspectives across the University, using visualisation and storytelling to simplify complexity and build a shared vision.

This helped the client align around priorities, gain buy-in and move forward with clarity and confidence in strategic decisions.

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