{"id":917,"date":"2020-07-10T09:53:09","date_gmt":"2020-07-10T09:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/?p=917"},"modified":"2020-07-10T09:53:09","modified_gmt":"2020-07-10T09:53:09","slug":"never-forget-international","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/2020\/07\/10\/never-forget-international\/","title":{"rendered":"Why international user needs should never be an afterthought"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are a truly international organisation, with students, partners, funders and members of staff from all over the world. But here at Southampton we have an organisational tendency to put \u2018international\u2019 into a little box, tie it with string and put it just over to one side. International is different, international is separate.<\/p>\n

With some colleagues from OneWeb I\u2019ve recently completed a discovery (research) project looking at how well our current website meets the needs of prospective international students. We talked to many international students and many internal stakeholders. We also did a complete usability and analytics review of the current site.<\/p>\n

The way we as a university view \u2018international\u2019 internally is replicated on our current website. We try to address international user needs through specific, separate pages \u2013 the international index and country pages. We forget to present all the rest of our content in a way that answers our international students\u2019 questions and makes them feel like they will belong here. Unintentionally we are creating a sense of exclusion.<\/p>\n

International students aren\u2019t (that) different:<\/h3>\n

We discovered that our international students share all the same user needs and motivations as our UK students, but some of the information needs to be filtered through a \u2018relevance lens\u2019 (don\u2019t just tell me about careers in the NHS, tell me what I can do when I go back to my home country). On top of this, international students have a set of informational needs (visas, arrivals, funding etc.) that are unique to them.<\/p>\n

\"Graphic<\/p>\n

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Routes to our university as an international student can be more varied and complicated than for our UK students. Even when using an agent or a partner institution, however, international students cite university websites as the most useful resource in their decision making (2019 International Student Survey<\/a>). Our prospective international students are using our website just as our UK students are, investigating the course first and then exploring life and practicalities.<\/p>\n

So, how is OneWeb going to ensure that every piece of content we create speaks to the needs of our prospective international (and EU) students as well as our UK students?<\/p>\n

Better content, starting now:<\/h3>\n

We\u2019re starting right now with the new \u2018Life in\u2019 content. This content looks at our cities, our campuses, our halls of residence and our student communities. For every page we\u2019re asking:<\/p>\n