User engagement is key to delivering high-quality applicationsthat not only meet the requirements set out, but delight the end users of them. We often struggle to find students willing to engage with us during development ofservices designed for them, and thus miss out on important feedback from them. Time with student users is often so restricted that this contact time is only available very late on in projects: typically for UAT periods when most of the development has been completed and the resources remaining are limited. In the past, some applications with both student and staff audiences will not have been seen by a single student until they go live.

I propose we make two part-time posts available to current students of a few hours a week running for a few months at a time (so as not to always get feedback from the same users). These students would be available to project teams as resources throughout the whole project lifecycle, available to project teams to:Give input on projects during initial planning on student-facing developments Feedback on designs / prototypes / iterations throughout the development process on student-facing projects. Perform peer testing on these projects at later stages of development.

We would still of course gather a larger group of different students for the final UAT process, as we do not want to restrict all student feedback to be done by these two students. The model of having in-house testers has been very useful here in the Student Systems Partnership, both being in high demand for work. As many of our systems across IS have large numbers of student users, access to a testing resource with the unique perspective of a student would be extremely useful.

Current project status

Report Date RAG Budget Effort Completed Effort to complete
April 2016 GREEN 0.0 days 0.0 days 0.0

Project Info

Project
Student testers
Code
API012
Programme
Z. IS Innovation - Applications (API) - Closed
Management Office
ISG PMO
Project Manager
Defeng Ma
Project Sponsor
Simon Marsden
Current Stage
Close
Status
Closed
Start Date
23-Nov-2015
Planning Date
n/a
Delivery Date
n/a
Close Date
n/a

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