On Monday 11 July 2022, just under a year since the successful launch of our new web platform with our education content, we will be making the next major digital transition with academic research content.
This marks a significant milestone for what is an extremely complex project, which has involved consultation with our academic community, as well as exercises to understand end users’ needs. This work has enabled us to design and test the optimum architecture and content to improve our visitors’ experience.
One of the core areas that is being addressed in this imminent transition are academic Staff Profiles. To help ensure that we and our visitors are getting the most accurate information, we are using Pure and Subscribe to provide the ‘single source of truth’. The use of these systems also makes it easier for colleagues to update in the future.
Over the last six months, many academic colleagues have been updating their information in Pure and setting their records to ‘public’ in Subscribe, so that we can automatically feed their data to their new staff profiles onto the new website on Monday 11 July.
There is a risk for colleagues who haven’t yet had a chance to do this yet, that their profiles will look incomplete on 11 July when the site goes live. There is also a risk for the small number of colleagues who have set their Subscribe profile to ‘private’, that their profile will not be accessible when the site goes live.
To ensure that all our staff have a presence on our new site, staff are strongly encouraged to update their information in Pure and/or switch your profile to “public” in Subscribe. This easy process takes about 30 minutes and details on how to do this are on the staff profile guidance. We would encourage colleagues to update their information by Sunday 10 July so that their profiles are up-to-date and available for the launch on Monday 11 July.
Emeritus Professors, visitors and PGRs were not in scope for the initial transition as there is inconsistent data across these groups, but it is possible that some may have been included in the transition. If this is the case, the same remedies as above should be carried out.
With the help of the faculties, we’ll be addressing these groups at the start of the new academic term, in the meantime their old profiles will still be accessible and searchable at the same urls, although they will not appear in the new platform’s staff listings.
Further information is available at:
The principles behind the design of the new products
Digital User Experience blog
Fact checking activity
