Why your university website needs subject-level pages

In a conversation with my six-year-old daughter recently, we discussed what she might want to be when she grows up. It turns out she wants to be a ballerina/footballer/author combination, because she doesn’t want to be bored. Her answer made me think again about how limited young people’s perception of future careers can be.

When we’re young, we don’t know what’s actually out there in the world of work. I know for certain that what I do for a living now wasn’t even a thing when I was in school – there’s no way I could have made a decision to be a content strategist. It didn’t exist. But even if it did, would I have been aware of it? Who would have told me about it? Who would have said “here’s the university course that’ll let you follow this career path”?

The same problem rears its head on a different scale when we look at university applicants. There are some career paths (such as medicine, law, or architecture) that students might be able to find information about, and find a relevant course to consider for university study. But for other careers, it’s harder to point at specific pathways and say “this is the route for you”. And that’s just for those people who do have a plan for their future. Others might have vague thoughts, or an idea about things that interest them, but nothing more concrete.

What’s really interesting to me about all of these different students – the career-minded ones, the aspirational but undirected ones, the “let’s see what happens” ones – is that they all share a similar level of awareness of what that means for the course they might need to study at university.

Essentially, they might all know the overarching subject area that they are interested in, but they won’t know what specific programme of study they’ll eventually choose.

Decision-making priorities

The UCAS "Where Next?" report shows that 83% of students choose their subject before they choose where to study. What some universities fail to realise is that this does not mean they've chosen their course by the time they visit your website.

This echoes what we’ve found ourselves in the past: a student might know they want to study biology, but that doesn't mean they know exactly which of the dozen biology courses on offer is right for them - and that can just be at one university! The lack of dedicated "subject" pages leaves these students very confused.

And no, the department or school page is very much not the same thing.

Look at an institution’s website. Is there a way for students to look at the kind of subjects they could be taught? Not individual courses, and not a college or institute page… something that tells them what “History” or “Engineering” actually is, and what it means to study it? Many of the subjects available at degree level are not directly taught to students earlier in their education, so there’s no guarantee that they’ll really know what engineering involves, or what economics actually entails.

Those considering English or Maths might have a better idea, but they still have to answer the question of “which course?”. If there are half a dozen variations on a maths programme, each with their own course page, is that helpful to students?

They’re not just deciding which course to choose out of the ones this institution offers, they’re comparing them with more sets of courses at another 5, another 10 universities. Why not make it easier for them?

I did a quick search on a university website for politics courses, and I found (among others) the following options:

• Politics

• Government, Policy and Society

• Politics, Philosophy and Economics

• Social Policy and Politics

• Sociology and Politics

These five courses are very different – they have a lot of different modules, they point a student in a different direction using different specialisms… but at the early stage of their selection journey the student doesn’t need that information. They just want to know what it’s like to study politics at this university.

(Note that I haven’t even added the variations of these courses, such as “with statistics” or “with a year abroad” or “with a year in industry”. I have a whole separate rant about why it’s unhelpful to separate those things out.)

What does it look like?

There are all kinds of ways to implement this kind of information. I'm personally a fan of the Oxford approach, which includes a slightly higher-level step - a page aimed at helping students decide what to focus on. Crucially, this page then provides a list of grouped subject areas to choose from under the heading "what inspires you most?":

This isn't a list of traditional "subjects". Instead it's grouping courses together in ways that might make more sense to prospective undergraduates. Putting Computer Science under "Using mathematics" is a much more user-friendly approach than expecting people who might never have studied the topic before to find it themselves.

Another great example of how to do this in an interesting way comes from the Open University. Instead of offering subjects or courses, they provide choices for potential career paths:

As you might expect, UCAS themselves have a range of subject-level pages that do a great job of explaining what a subject actually is and why a student might want to study it: 

Win-win

The UCAS statistic I quoted earlier is important to remember. Students are not, in the early stage of their decision-making, choosing a place or a course to study. They’re trying to decide what their area of study is going to be. Using a subject-level page or section to showcase your institution’s offer for that subject helps them make that decision.

And it helps you, too. There are a bunch of good reasons for providing subject-level information: 

• It smooths out a student’s application journey, making them see you in a positive light.

• It helps them to find you in the first place, through answering the kind of questions they ask on a Google search.

• It encourages you to collaborate internally to be able to distil your subject offering into easily understood chunks.

… and probably more. But the main one is that it helps students to make their decision, and that’s the whole point of a university website in the first place.

When my daughter is planning her future career, I’m not sure I’ll be able to point her to a course that puts her on the path to being a ballerina/footballer/author, but I’m hoping there’ll be a few more subject-level pages to help he work it out for herself…

So what's next? Want some help?

If you're in the middle of working out how you can make effective subject-level pages for your institution (or if this post has made you realise you need to start), there are all sorts of ways we could help. We can:

• ensure you understand how your audiences want to search

• carry out the information architecture, content modelling and taxonomy work to power it all

• design wireframes for these sections

• create content for your new pages

• conduct the user testing to help with your development and assess what you already have

• develop personas so that you create appropriate landing pages to match different user motivations

... or whatever else you need. Drop us a line, and we can chat.