UWE Bristol
Creating personalised student journeys and laying the foundations for lifelong learning.
Digital transformation impacts every industry and sector, but with some Higher Education Institutions dating back to the 11th century, the magnitude of this task is no minor undertaking.
The University of the West of England (UWE) Bristol have that ambition. They are on a mission. To harness the opportunities of the digital age in the delivery of a personalised experience that enables students and staff to thrive, succeed and flourish.
Great State were chosen to partner with UWE because of our deep experience working with a Higher Education institutions, and understanding of the challenges faced. So working very much in partnership with the UWE teams across the organisation (digital, student experience, academic, research), we embarked on this strategic digital transformation project.
We are really impressed with Great State's attitude to teamwork, their openness and approachability.
The programme goal was to transform the user experience and take every student on a journey through which they can easily find the information they need, feel supported to succeed, and be excited by what UWE Bristol has to offer.
Decision making was informed by research undertaken by Great State with students. As part of the project we carried out a ‘design sprint’ - a short cycle process to answer critical business questions through design, prototyping and testing ideas with real customers within just one week.
We worked with the UWE team to identify the most important user needs and the most complex technical challenges associated with meeting them, before building solutions as POCs and testing them with real users.
The key-stone digital product enabling this new digital experience is an industry-leading Sitecore Digital Experience platform (DXP), hosted in the cloud and designed for and around the needs of their students. This provides UWE with the capability to deliver personalised content over a range of channels and supports the development and integration of associated applications and services. As Sitecore Gold partners, Great State are well placed to ensure UWE make the most of this platform now and in the future.
The project was delivered by a co-located, fully collaborative team working swiftly through an agile sprint methodology. This allowed us to deliver an impressive level of features in a short space of time, all whilst upskilling the UWE team ensuring they are self-sufficient in terms of running and extending the platform as part of an evolution to Product centric digital roadmap.
