Robert Mills
Welcome to the Fourth Wall Content Podcast. I'm your host, Robert Mills.
Actors address the audience directly by breaking the fourth wall in theatre and film. This podcast explores the fourth wall in a different sense.
We’ll share techniques, strategies, and tactics to forge meaningful connections with audiences, users, and stakeholders.
Our conversations with experienced and innovative content, UX and research practitioners will uncover the details of real projects with lessons learned along the way and outcomes of the work too.
Each episode will provide you with practical insights and actionable takeaways to help you meet user needs, connect with customers in a genuine way, or engage stakeholders meaningfully. Let’s get to it.
Hello, thanks for joining us for episode one. My goodness, this podcast was just an idea a few weeks ago and now here we are. Plus, we are starting with an incredible guest. It's an honour to introduce Lauren Tormey. Lauren is a senior content designer at the University of Edinburgh where she's worked since completing her undergraduate degree in linguistics there. She leads a team of three content designers who form part of a larger multidisciplinary design team and they're focused on improving the university's digital provision for prospective students. In her eight years in higher education Lauren has used her editorial, CMS and UX skills to support the creation and maintenance of more effective human-centered content. In her spare time Lauren is a keen runner and an advocate for a more humane immigration system in the UK. Lauren, thank you so much for chatting with me today.
Lauren Tormey
Thank you so much for having me Rob. I'm so excited to be here and I'm so excited to be the first guest on this podcast.
Robert Mills
I genuinely was so pleased when you said you're happy to be a guest on the show because also genuinely I am a huge fan of your work and your advocacy for making content and services more accessible and inclusive, you're so willing to share with the community and I think we need more of that. So yeah, I'm looking forward to digging into some of that work with you today.
Lauren Tormey
Thank you so much for saying that's really nice.
Robert Mills
Okay, so I'm going to start all episodes by asking the guest who the audience or the user is that is going to be the focus of the conversation or the project that we're talking about. So with that in mind can you tell us a little bit about the audience that this project is related to, please?
Lauren Tormey
So this project is related to immigrant students studying at the University of Edinburgh. So specifically we were looking at students who needed visas to come to study at the university and the experience around applying for that visa to get their study started.
Robert Mills
That's a really like clear audience in mind. I think from the from the information you've already shared about the project, you said this was going back what 18 months to years now this kind of piece of work?
Lauren Tormey
Yeah so it ran from January to May 2022.
Robert Mills
Okay great, yeah so a little while has passed. You mentioned that there was an internal team that you kind of were engaged with as part of the project, so that internal audience as well.
Lauren Tormey
Yeah so the service, I'll just say, the service we're working with is the Student Immigration Service and so they are the internal department at the university who help international students applying for a visa and they also deal with any immigration matters that come up for international students while they are studying at the university.
Robert Mills
Okay great, so an internal audience you had to work closely with in order to create content for that external audience of prospective overseas students. And because you so kindly sent all the information beforehand, and you've talked about this project before, it has left me with about 392 questions, but only about 40 minutes. But I would quite like to start with, how did you know that that digital experience for student visa applications, needed to be improved in the first place? You know what kind of informed that understanding and then was the catalyst for the work that we'll talk a bit about today?
Lauren Tormey
I'll give a bit of context of what my team does. Obviously you're introduction sort of covered it so we're my team is tasked with improving prospective student digital experiences and so the way my particular content team is set up is we are tasked with working with different departments around the university who have prospective student facing services and we go and do like end-to-end content design projects to find out what are the problems happening in that service space and then you know develop the solutions to fix those issues. And so the first project my team did when it was formed in 2019 was with our tuition fee service and we did a lot of blogging about it and a lot of internal presentations saying this is the great work we've done and it was through sort of promoting that work that the immigration service had heard about our work and the head of that team actually contacted my boss and said yeah what you did for the fees team please do the same thing for us because we're having issues we're having so many enquiries coming in so you know please help us.
Robert Mills
And I don't think that's common for teams to almost self-identify that they need that input or that help or that guidance so that's that's quite something that they came to you as as opposed to you having to go to them and get that initial kind of buy in and that engagement and doing all that convincing that we know that content designers have to spend a lot of time doing and re-doing and re-doing. So that's quite something that they came to you and were asking for that help.
Lauren Tormey
Definitely. I mean, yeah, that wasn't the case in that, for instance, that tuition fees project I mentioned where, you know, like Project Board decided, okay, this is what you're going to do, this year you're going to work with fees first. Whereas, you know, but having that chance to do that project and be able to promote that work, you know, lets teams that are kind of struggling with the number of enquiries are getting that and are cognizant of that being like, Oh, hey, please, can you help us out? Um, so yeah, definitely you won't get that with every department. But I think our work of internally promoting the work we do does help with actually people approaching us.
Robert Mills
That's great to see how the impact that work and have, you know, with one small team across the wider organisation. But even with that in mind, even with them coming to you and asking for that help, was there still any convincing that had to happen. Was there a big cell with that internal audience and that internal team or was it like actually they're engaged and we are ready to go?
Lauren Tormey
Yeah it wasn't too much of a big sell but the thing we had to advocate for, not advocate for but to get them on board with was explaining our ways of working like they knew like oh yes like you know fix up our stuff so you know it'll be better and we don't have any as many enquiries but thing we had to say was, "Okay, yeah, we'll do that." However, this is the way we work. We need to be working closely with you, have subject matter experts from your team collaborating closely with our content designers to create new content. We work in Agile Scrum methodology, explaining what that is. We're going to work in these short iterations of work where we do a bit of work, and then we're going to actually have retros at the end where we... But you need to come and be part of, and you're going to tell us how our ways of working is doing, and we're going to improve things as we go. So that was the sort of buy-in we needed to get in the sense that like, okay, yes, great that you want to work with us, but we're only going to work with you if you agree to work in this way. And they were happy to do so.
Robert Mills
Which is amazing, because sometimes even if they're so willing and so desperate for help, they know that the content needs to change and the UX needs to change. But when it comes to changing how people work, that can be the scary part, right? Because it's just like even though I know our process isn't as good as it could be, it's still familiar and there's comfort in that familiarity I think. And so the less ideal process can still be the more comfortable one and can be the path of least resistance. So it's interesting that that was still the part that really had to be kind of, I guess, explained and they had to be brought along for.
Lauren Tormey
I'd say the biggest thing that university departments need to grapple with when it comes to working with us is just the time commitment. Because teams will be coming at us because they are stretched so thin because of all the work they're dealing with. So finding the time commitment to actually have someone act as the subject matter experts that we liaise with, that's the biggest thing. But in this case, they did agree to set aside some time for it. And we were specifically doing this project January through May because this was their not as busy time of the year. Obviously during the summer and start of term is the busy time of year when people are starting the process of applying for visas and coming over to the UK. So this was like the window that we could work with them that they actually had the capacity to do it.
Robert Mills
Great. Even that like that level of consideration, surely, you know, must have been so appreciated from their side as well, which always then helps to form those kinds of co-creation relationships and, you know, that kind of collaborative environment. Were they kind of prescriptive or descriptive in terms of what they needed help with and therefore what they wanted the project to, aside from the process of how it was going to get done, but what they wanted the project to maybe look like or what they wanted it to achieve?
Lauren Tormey
So not necessarily from the beginning, or at least I know of, because it was more my boss involved with it. discussions. But what we have, we sort of went and open-ended and had a kickoff meeting right at the start where we had a workshop to explore, you know, okay, we're gonna do this project, we're gonna help you like tackling enquiries you get, but like what, you know, there's so much having to do with the immigration service that we could look at, like what areas do we want to focus on, like when we do the user research, what are we gonna be looking at? And so we did some activities to ask them about like, you know, from what you understand and what evidence you have, what do you know, like what are the biggest enquiries you have coming in and stuff.
By far, the biggest thing they talked about was enquiries related to this thing called CAS. CAS stands for Confirmation of Acceptance for Studies. More than anything else, this is the thing they get asked about. It's like a digital document that has this reference number that all students need to apply for a student visa to study at the university. This is the thing that gets asked about above all else. So they knew it had to do with that. And they also brought up how lots of questions about the financial requirements students are required to show as part of their visa applications. So we kind of honed in on the fact, OK, it's clearly like the actual applying for a visa process is the area we need to be focusing on. So compared to, for instance, one of the other things we could have looked at was there's a graduate-route visa. So you can study for two years after you finish your degree in the UK. And the immigration service are the people that help students apply for that. So that was another big area that was coming up, but it wasn't as big as like the applying for visa, you know, being a first point of call for that process. So it was kind of determined after that kickoff meeting, okay, we're gonna focus our research on the applying for visa section. And if we have time, we'll get to like the graduate route visa and all that other stuff, but this is the first thing we're gonna focus on.
Robert Mills
And where did it go from there? So, you know, you had that initial kickoff workshop, you kind of aligned around, I guess, the purpose and the goals of the project. How did it then become a project that was live?
Lauren Tormey
Yeah, so that was sort of like, yeah, and that's like our first sort of sprint of that project. So once we determined, okay, we're gonna do the applying stuff, we then did our second sprint was the user research bit. And so we did interviews with, so we had interviewed service staff, so like immigration advisors, like frontline staff in the service who answer the enquiries coming through. We interviewed international equipment staff who speak to students at events, you know, what questions they might get about student visas. We talked to our, we have like a prospective student inquiry team, we spoke to them, and we also spoke to actual students of course who had just started their first year at the university and so who had just been through the entire visa application process and to ask them about how they went. So all questions focused on that application or or application process for the initial student visa.
Robert Mills
When we say a sprint here is that a two-week period?
Lauren Tormey
Each sprint was either two or three weeks so this particular one because it was very, a lot of interviews, this is a three-week one.
Robert Mills
Okay great, I mean that's still, yeah that is a lot. I almost thought you were going to say three sprints, I'm like yes, six week or nine weeks, okay. Yeah, that's a lot.
Lauren Tormey
It was a lot. It wasn't just me though, I have a team.
Robert Mills
But it was the content designers doing those interviews?
Lauren Tormey
It was the content designers doing those interviews. We do have a user researcher on our team, but what was happening is our user researcher at that point was working on research needed to do for a big project that my team, all of our team is involved in now. And so actually what was happening at this time is this project was my first project as a senior content designer manager of a new team of three content designers who were all new, like had just started and like we even had actually two of our content designers joined like midway through the project. So my boss was really keen that kind of we have this first initial project just as a content team to do to introduce my team to content design and this be the thing that kind of, you know we could make the mistakes on. So when we got into other projects later, this was a nice little piece we had worked on to learn everything we needed to know.
Robert Mills
Yeah, that's quite an introduction together as a team. I love that you were given that opportunity and it's like, right, you can make mistakes as soon as you go in.
Lauren Tormey
Exactly, and I think it was really great doing a project where the department had come to us and they were so keen working with us, because I could say overall, every project has its difficulties and whatnot, but definitely since other stuff we've worked on, since this has been the smoothest project I've ever worked on. It might be the smoothest project I ever work on. So yeah, so definitely having the, you know, where I was dealing with, you know, trying to be a manager for the first time and leading this big project, or maybe, well, big project, big project in terms of, you know, big 'cause it's been the first time for me. And you know, my team being just thrown in the deep end of like, here's how to be a content designer. Like, I think that that worked really well.
Robert Mills
It so easily could have gone the other way. So I'm really thinking that that was the experience you have. I'm definitely intrigued by this research that you did, you know, in three weeks as you were forming this new team and you know, getting to get into know each other and find out new ways of working together. Was there anything in that research that went against your assumptions or maybe your initial kind of project goals? Was there anything there where you had to maybe rethink or pivot before you kind of went further into the sprints?
Lauren Tormey
No, in the sense that, well, I guess yes and no. No, in the sense that I think the biggest things that the immigration service said that they were having trouble with when we did the research and like, it was like, oh yeah, okay, no, that's, you were right. This is the top thing you're getting asked about. But I think like the difference between interviewing some of the immigration staff versus the students made us realise that like, maybe some of the assumptions the staff had about the process weren't like reflected in what students were saying or like they kind of had like a different experience. And it wasn't necessarily like, like the staff were wrong. It was just like, I don't know, having that actual like end users speak about the process versus like a staff member's interpretation of like, oh, this is what students do was like, yeah, a bit different than maybe what they had said. Oh, like this is like this, this is like that. And students are just like, "Oh, no, it's like this for me." But I guess, you know, I think the thing about speaking with individual students is obviously staff have a view of, you know, the entire student population that they speak to, like, which is a much larger range than, you know, someone's singular experience as, you know, "I've applied for my one visa. This is what my particular experience was like." But that can't really speak for generalisations across the whole of, you know, students applying.
Robert Mills
Yeah, it makes sense. I'm still trying to think of the project in a sort of chronological and linear fashion. So you've done the research, you kind of got these insights, you've tested some of those assumptions, you pretty much know where you need to get to. What was the next step in then getting there based on that kind of research phase and sprint.
Lauren Tormey
So I should say, I talked about Scrum before, I should also say the other part of our projects is we follow the double diamond design process. And so that means for anyone not familiar, working through different stages and design projects. So we start with discovery to see what was happening in the problem space. And then we want to define what those biggest problems were. So that's kind of like the part we're just completed here that we just talked about. And then we go into the development phase where we want to develop solutions that fix those problems and then we want to test them out, see what's working or not and iterate on the solutions, and then we will deliver the solutions that we found work. So at this point in the project, we had to determine, OK, like actually what the Immigration Service said were the biggest problems. We have the research that backs us up. And so then we get to the point where we then have to agree, OK, let's prioritise of these issues. We'll agree that, OK, the CAS issue is the biggest issue, then financial requirements, and then narrow down if we have time, what are the other big issues we want to fix? So at that point, we had a bunch of user stories we had written from the research, so just written by my team. And so when we decided on the topic we would want to work on, we then would get into our development sprints, which were either two or three weeks, and we would decide, well, the first part of that sprint was to work with the team to say, okay, we're gonna focus on the CAS stories or whatever. So here are the stories we wrote based on our best knowledge from the research. But please help us refine these because you will have a better idea. Like for instance, if maybe we wrote too many stories that were maybe saying the same thing and could be consolidated into one or we needed to word things in a specific way, or maybe we were missing something that wasn't captured in the research, but that had to be captured in order to write the content for that. So we would have sort of like a session at the start of the sprint to define and redefine those stories. And then what we would do is we then get into a process of doing ideation and prototyping workshops. So of the stories we agreed to focus on, we would then go and have a workshop just within my team internally. So this wasn't with the subject matter experts. And that's just mainly from a time concern for their ends. Thought it was easier to do the actual creating initial draft of a prototype we could share with them within my team. And so I have this particular format that I run for these workshops where we do sort of like assess what's happening with the content currently. So in all these cases, content did exist. We just needed to redevelop it. So we would look at what currently exists and we'd compare that against the user stories and we'd say, like, what do we notice about the content? Like how well or not well is the user story being answered? Where could we go from here? You know, what's really hard to read about it? What's working well about it? And then we get into like how might we session, we said, okay, well based on the things we noticed, like how might we actually better answer user stories with this content? And then we do a sketching exercise where we do sketches, and then we would do sharing our sketches around and seeing everyone says what they liked about each other's sketches. And then we'd get to a point where we'd have final sketches and then we'd have to make a decision, okay, based on what we sketched, do we all agree on someone's like kind of sketch that we should say, okay, let's go in that direction let's develop this further or are we actually not sure and maybe you want to sketch maybe two ideas that we want to present to our stakeholders. So that's the point where we get to that. And usually with the case was either developing one piece of content and I'd say, okay, I have a team of three content designers, so I'd say, Freya, you develop this, Flo, you develop this, Heike, you develop this. Or if we had two, we'd split up the work and say, okay, these people are gonna work on this, these people are going to work on that. And that's the point at which we would then be starting the sort of pair writing process after we had developed a sort of full prototype that we could share with them. And I'm going to stop right there, 'cause I've said a lot and I want you to ask a question. And I don't remember if I've actually gone off tangent and that didn't answer the question at all.
Robert Mills
I mean, what you said was fascinating. It doesn't matter where we wanted to be or whether we've taken a conversation elsewhere, it's all good. I was intrigued about this idea of going from sketches to, well, my question was gonna be, what does developing the content from those ideas look like? And you mentioned like prototypes and things, I guess, and they're like quite low fidelity prototypes. What was used to create those prototypes at that stage?
Lauren Tormey
Yeah, so obviously we had like, the first thing was just the sketches. And the sketches would obviously just be like, you know, there's, there's your title, there's your summary sentence and your, your hangs and whatnot. And then yeah, it depended, but the first point of call would either be just making it on a word doc or if, or on a Miro board or a Miro frame rather. And so we'd start there and then we get to a point where once we've like developed initial draft, we would actually then put it in our CMS. And the reason we did this is because at the end of the day, this content was going to end up on the CMS. So use that as your prototyping software. It's pretty high fidelity in that sense. But also because when we got to a point where we had written a draft, it's all great to write a draft. But sometimes when you put it in the CMS, only when you see it, you have this idea of, OK, this is how it's going to be formatted and styled out. Only when you see it in actual CMS do you actually see, oh, actually, I think I've actually-- I thought this was little content, but now it actually looks like really long when I put it onto a webpage. So that would give us a good chance to see if we needed to refine it further before we presented it to stakeholders. Also, when like it going into this pair writing sessions with stakeholders, having like the finished like website page they could see, I mean, obviously not the final version, but like something they could see that wasn't a Word doc, I think just helps them visually see, okay, this is the direction we're heading in. But obviously when it came to making changes, we would have a Word doc separately where we need to make those changes, which obviously got annoying in the sense that like, okay, any changes meant we then have to update the web pages, but I think we were all helped by visually seeing what that sort of end product would look like.
Robert Mills
I worked on a project last year and we were also, so I was pair writing with content designer, or sometimes it was a subject expert, sometimes it was a translator, or they were all internal at the organisation. And when it came to sharing the new, again, most of it was existing content that we were redesigning when it came to sharing that, we found the most effective way to share it was to put it into the test site so they could see it as it would look in context with the branding, with the actual navigation and the menus. It also presented limitations within the CMS that we then had to work around or work with. I can see why you were keen to get to that stage and show them. So did the pair writing happen in the CMS or you know all the related words or did it happen before you got to that CMS stage?
Lauren Tormey
So in the Word doc. So we would present like the I guess pair writing was really more pair reviewing in the sense that we would have a draft ready to go because obviously the content you know the there was content already existing and it's just about improving what was there to make sure it was better answering the user stories that were needed so you know we had like a basis to work with And also just in terms of time, I think it's also a lot easier if you do have content like that to just go in with like, okay, here's like a potential draft we could use now you go in and tell us where we've done it wrong and like, and we can we can make it right. So, yes, that was in a word doc where we would just go through line by line then to say, okay, is this sound okay? This isn't like, is this correct? Are we like interpreting this particular aspect correctly? And so that made it much easier to just go through, like, you know, these are the questions we have. And also like to sometimes just have like a list of questions like, okay, like when we were writing it, like, okay, well I've written it this way, but I still have questions about this. And like, we need to make sure we answer this because if I'm not understanding it, then probably our end user is not gonna understand it because we haven't said that effectively.
Robert Mills
Once that was approved, was it like, right, we're just gonna, we're gonna make the changes now and then actually publish that? And were you publishing sort of pages at a time or was it all done at the end? Like how, what was that part of the process look like? I wasn't intrigued by those final stages because there's lots of tripwires right at the end.
Lauren Tormey
Well, no, we had to test our content.
Robert Mills
Of course, I can’t believe I missed that. Of course.
Lauren Tormey
No, so what we did, so actually during the initial stages of the project, we tested specifically with staff members. And the reason we did that, even though we were designing for students, because when we were working on each page, like the tests we wanted to do were like 15 minutes long and like when we test with students we like to pay them for their time. So it's just like we just need you know we need we need someone to play the part at the moment like that can easily we can quickly organise this because we're working in like this short sprint. So let's just test with staff now and then we decided at the end of the project we would have longer tests from all the content we publish or all the priority content we published I should say. And that's the point at which we'll test with students and get the feedback on everything and you know make some final updates from there.
At the initial point of creating each piece of content, we tested with staff. And so worked with the service to create some scenarios of, you know, what's the scenario we could test where someone would be coming to this content, what would they be doing? And so from that, we would learn, you know, what wasn't working and not working with the content. So we had like collaborative sessions where we invited the immigration service staff to come and watch the videos with us that we had recorded. We could all see together, you know, what was happening with the content. And then, yeah, so we came up with some edits to the content based on what we see in the videos about what was not working. So that was the point at which we then had a final draft. Just double-check, "Okay, everyone's okay, everything. We're going to go publish."
In the earlier development sprints, it was the case that, like all within that sprint, yes, we've created, we've drafted, we've paired, written, we've done the testing, and we've made the final edits, and then at the end of the sprint, the final thing would just be to publish. So at the beginning of the project, it was mainly a case of sort of publishing as we went. And then as we got further down the project and sort of adding, started adding more to our backlog of pages to draft, we decided, or, okay, let's wait until now to the end of the project to publish everything else because, you know, a go live session is quite stressful. And there are also some of the pages we were drafting had like IA implications. So it was just like, okay, rather than like make all these changes now, let's just wait until the end to publish the rest of the stuff. But the stuff at the beginning was all published right to start or sorry within that sprint I should say.
Robert Mills
Yeah the reason why I asked that I just find that interesting that whole process of getting it actually delivered so if you say that was like the you know the fourth part of that double diamond actually getting it delivered because again the same project I mentioned before that I worked on last year it was around grant funding for a particular service and as we were writing the content and pair writing it, the process for applying for the grant was changing by a third party, you know, like by an external organisation. And so our content was immediately out of date. And so it made it so hard to know when we could publish and then we had to kind of hold it back. And so that's why I was interested in that bit.
Lauren Tormey
Immigration rules change all the time. So I mean, I think I think the biggest change we had, so for instance, there was content around, this is a really technique I took all day about how awful the UK immigration system is. But one of the really awful aspects of the student visa process that changed, I think it was right at the end of the project. So I think our content did go live, but it immediately had to go down, was content around students from certain countries had to register with the police immediately after arriving in the UK. And the home office actually scrapped that requirement and so the content we had sort of fixed up around that just immediately just went away as soon as like the project was finished. So yeah, there was examples of things changing all the time.
Robert Mills
Yeah, one of the many joys of the work that we do, right?
Lauren Tormey
Yeah.
Robert Mills
All the external factors changing what we need to do and when. But actually, you mentioned something there, which I did want to chat to you about in terms of you mentioned like certain countries there. And so thinking about that external audience of prospective overseas students. Again from some of the documentation you shared with me before we started chatting today, it mentioned there about dividing content by audience, because depending on what country you're applying from will depend on what that process is. What did that mean in terms of how many flows and journeys and what impacts on the work that you were doing?
Lauren Tormey
Yeah, so I guess the first place this came up in the project was actually not by country level, it was by undergraduate versus postgraduate students. So this came when creating the new content for getting your CAS number. And what we found is that our initial drafts, we had created something where it's just like, you know, how to request a CAS and explain the whole process. And we found out when we did test it, what happens was, well, I should say about this content, there's some differences in the process of requesting a CAS that are a bit different for undergraduate students versus postgraduate students. And so what we created was a page to explain the steps, but at the point of which the undergraduate versus postgrad experience differed, we just had little subheadings that say, OK, undergrads, do this, postgrads do this. And we presented this at the usability test, and people just failed. And were just not seeing this distinction and getting so confused and overwhelmed with the content. Because not only was it just like the distinction between the two audiences, but it was just like probably more words needed to be, more words than needed to say, explain how this process went. And so we were just like, okay, like we need to strip this down to like the bare minimum. And we also realised like, you know, people are, you know, it's gonna trip people up to try and find those little differences. So let's just like separate things out. And I think also one of the things one of the stakeholders said during the project was like, every other piece of content on the university website, everything is broken down by undergrad versus post grad. So like, I think, made the assumption that students have this expectation that, okay, well, I'm gonna go on the undergraduate versus the post grad journey, depending on who you are. And so we decided to go with that. And what we did was really, really did strip the content so much where we just listed, okay, here is a short numbered list of like, these are the steps you need to follow. And then we're only gonna have some explanations of some of those steps below. And if you wanna read it, you can read it, but everyone just needs to read this very quick list to see what is relevant to them. And when we tested that, that did so much better. So that was one of those cases where we had to do it by audience. And one of the cases where we had to do differences by country was, for instance, the difference. So there's pages around applying for a visa and there's a difference between if you apply inside the UK or outside the UK. And when it came to doing the outside UK pages, which were the ones that we prioritised working on in the project, there's actually quite a lot of differences in the process between applying if you are an EU student or from the rest of the world. And so even though these pages were, oh that concept sort of combined first, when we were trying to like design it we were just like, okay no, like we need we need to separate this out otherwise like we're just going to have the same thing we had, you know, no one's going to read their exception to the rule type of thing, like we need to actually separate this out. And when we did do that it ended up being like a difference number of steps between EU and non-EU students. So it ended up being, you know, I think if we did have them together, like we would have been creating like fake steps that some students really didn't need to read because it didn't apply to them. So we had to, yeah, it's one of those cases where, you know, yes, we do want to make content by task, but actually breaking down by audience helped our audience just see what was relevant to them. Because I think if we left it all together, it just would have been so much more confusing for them.
Robert Mills
Hearing you talk about this project, it's almost making me a little bit anxious just hearing you talk about it in the sense of, universities are just so complex. There are so many like considerations and layers and nuances depending on where the student is based and what they're studying and what stage of their studies are at. That's why it's been so interesting to hear the story that you're sharing of how you actually got to that point of knowing, you know, what to do and actually what approach to take and how best to do it and how to divide it and all that kind of stuff.
Lauren Tormey
I know, to an extent, any service can experience this, but also immigration is such an awful, awfully complex thing. And the fact that there are different things for different countries and a lot of that is just so honestly racially motivated with the certain things they make countries from, you know, countries with black and brown majority populations do versus other countries, like the awfulness of the home office is what drives some of the complication in this process. And then we have to design content around it. So shame on them for making our life difficult.
Robert Mills
Hats off to you and all of the others who are, you know, who are having to work with it and those constraints and frustrations and still able to design content actually is, you know, is proven to be useful, which actually coincidentally leads us nicely into the way we can begin to wrap up the chat in terms of measurement and success and next steps and all that kind of stuff. You kind of mentioned encouraging greater levels of self-service through like doing not just this project but also the wider work that your team does and the university is trying to achieve. Were you able to measure success in terms of did it increase more self-service or what were the other markers for how the project actually turned out?
Lauren Tormey
Yeah, so this is the part where I have like less exciting stuff to share because for a few reasons. One, so we had no like baseline measures to compare our work against because the service didn't have them. So where other projects that departments do have that and I have a lovely fancy number to share, I can't say that which makes me sad. But we do have numbers related to self-service. So about five minutes after the project wrapped up we have a performance analyst, Carla, and our team who did some numbers and analytics and we could see, so one actually things we did design in the the project was sort of like a, it was a contact form to encourage self-service. So at the point, if someone wants to contact the service, they're filtered through to this form. The form asks you who you are, like a prospective student, current student, and then you have to pick a topic of what your question is about, so like is it about CAS numbers, is it about financial requirements? And then when you select that topic, sort of like a prompt text appears, that kind of gives you the answers to the top most questions about that particular topic. So we encourage people to actually hopefully find the answer to their questions so that they then don't submit the form or like linked out to pages for their information. And so we do have data to show that I think it was 54% of people who got to the form actually tried to self-serve in some way and actually went out to the links that we're providing to give them more information. So I mean that was an encouraging number to see and I think of those people that did go look at other pages then it was only 27% that actually came back to the form so I think did get some encouraging stats to see that people were actually going off to see, actually, can I answer this question myself, and then not actually deciding to go through and submit the form. But that's the last of measurements I can give you because, well, I say in normal times, the way our team is meant to operate is like, my team will have done this project, and then I'll hand over to our content operations team, and they will manage the ongoing relationship with the services we work with and do check in to see how are things going, are there any improvements to content we need to make. But what did happen after this project finished is that we started working on a very big project where my team is redesigning our CMSs that host our online course finders and that's a very big all hands on deck project. And so even though we're meant to upkeep this relationship and find out more about how it's going, I've just sort of stepped back and say, yeah, we're not gonna do that because I just believe protecting my mental health and my stress levels at work is more important than any data measurements we can do and stuff we worked on.
Robert Mills
I mean, if ever there's a reason to, that's the reason. I really appreciate your honesty there with that, because I think that's a really realistic experience that you shared there. But it's good that you still have some data to kind of show the impact that that had had. And I guess there's nothing to say that you wouldn't be able to check back in with that team when other priorities are allowed and kind of see where they were at. And do we need to do a phase two or anything like that? Nothing's fixed, I guess, in the line of work that we do.
Lauren Tormey
100% totally. So when that space opens up, we will get back to that. But for right now, we've got other priorities to do, but I will say, so like the next project my team did was another sort of mini project before we began the big project. And another sort of type of thing, just improving content in a prospective student area. And they were a service that did have baseline measurements we could compare to. And we did see in the area, the top area we were working in on that project, enquiries from a particular time period in the year before to the year after when we worked on it, enquiries in the top content area had gone down by 75%. So I'm pretty confident that what we did in the immigration project was also producing some pretty groovy numbers, even if we don't have access to them.
Robert Mills
We are fast approaching the end of time. The end of time. The end of this particular period of time, which is our conversation, it’s not all doom and gloom. I just want to kind of wrap up by taking a slightly different stance, but still thinking about audiences. So can you think of a time recently where you've been the audience or you've been the user and what have you watched, read or listened to that might have provoked a reaction or stirred an emotion in you and it could be work-related or otherwise.
Lauren Tormey
Yeah I just say there's so much I could answer with here because literally everything I interact with provokes a reaction in me. I mean, I honestly, I have a series of blog posts on my whole citizen application experience to become a UK citizen. Where I talk about stuff like this, but I won't, you know, you can read those online. I'll talk about my most recent, which I was actually, I was so frustrated with. I had to post it in a content Slack group just to be like, this content is so terrible. So I'm moving house in a few weeks and I had to reach out to my broadband provider to, you know, move my services to my new house. And I can't believe, I mean, it has to be the, like, this has to be the most confusing experience I've ever endured in terms of not understanding what a company was trying to tell me. But when trying to book my services, I had to put in my new postcode to say where I was moving to, and then I was taken to the screen and it said, "Oh, this is great news. You don't have to change a thing about your service because we can already set up your service there." And then immediately the next line after that was like, "Oh, sorry, we can't have the same service because the things don't exist there." It was just saying the same, like the complete opposite things within the same word count space. And then the other thing was I, it said, oh, our service is so easy to set up. You don't need an engineer to visit to set it up. And I was like, great. And then I went to actually book the date to set up the service. And it was like an engineer site is an engineer visit is needed. And I was like, okay, well, I'm not really sure what's happening here. And the worst had happened overall was throughout this whole thing. It told me, okay, you're going to keep your, you know, your contract is going to be 27 pounds a month. That's what you're paying currently. I was like, great. I'll just, I just, I just want the same thing. And then I got an email after I pressed submit on this form to say, so happy you're moving with us. It's gonna be 33 pounds a month and I was just like, "Excuse me!" Like, "I don't think so." I don't think so! Oh no, I will, I hate customer service chats, but I will stay with them as long as I have to to make sure I am not scammed out of any money that I don't want to be scammed out of. So yeah, so I had to endure that and finally got my 27 pounds a month back, but oh god, like, it's just telling me one thing and then immediately telling me the other, but like, when you come to messing with my money, that's the point where I'm just like, "No, we are making sure we resolve this quickly."
Robert Mills
Yes, I will wait three hours, 20 minutes. Thank you. Thank you. I had a similar experience when I moved house, actually, with the internet provider. And when I phoned them up, they literally said to me on the phone, "Our processors are just not joined up. One team doesn't talk to the other." And I was just stuck in a loop. And I don't know whether, because of the line of work we do, we're more critical or less. I don't know.
Lauren Tormey
100% I have less patience to deal with crappy content because it's just like, "This is what I do for a living. Why aren't you doing this?" And obviously, apologies to any content designers that work at these companies. And it's the same thing for the University of Edinburgh. If someone had a crappy content experience at the University of Edinburgh, I'd be like, "I know because most of what's out there is crap." But the little pockets I'm working on, those are pretty great. So you're welcome for that.
Robert Mills
How about you apply for a visa? Yeah. But yeah, well, we're currently looking at potential schools for our son. And so I'm now spending time on school websites. Oh, wow. Wow. Is there work to be done there? That's a whole not just a podcast episode, a whole podcast series, I think.
Lauren Tormey
Yeah, the last question was podcast could just be a spin off podcast where everyone just talks about everything that's made them angry online.
Robert Mills
That's a really good idea. Like a soap box where people can just come and vent about these terrible user experiences. Yeah, it's a great idea. It would be like a thousand episodes.
Lauren Tormey
Oh, totally.
Robert Mills
But hey, this is episode one. We do have to bring it to a close, but I am so incredibly grateful that you, first of all, that you said yes to chatting with me and then that you are willing to just be so honest about the project and share so many details. I mean, the work that you and the team did, it just goes to show the breadth and the depth of the work the content designers do, 'cause I know there was just so much involved, and I wish we could chat, chat, chat, but we can't. So yeah, all that's left is for me to say thank you. It was really insightful and I'm absolutely thrilled that this is gonna kick start what I hope will be a good series of episodes.
Lauren Tormey
Thank you so much, Rob, for having me, And I should say for anyone who is interested in the project, if you go to edin.ac/immigration-posts you can read all of our blogs on the project. We've recapped each sprint, so there's a lot of detail in there if you want to see more of the specifics. -
Robert Mills
Brill, thanks, Lauren. I will definitely link to that in the show notes when we publish the episode. Thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it. And good luck with your next content project.
Lauren Tormey
Great, thanks so much, Rob.
Robert Mills
Thank you for listening to the Fourth Wall Content podcast. All episodes, transcripts and show notes can be found at fourthwallcontent.com. Good luck with your content challenges and I hope you can join us next time. Bye for now.
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