Putting the user in the centre of any communications project (university website, university app, university prospectus, interactive video) is essential if you are to successfully engage and deliver to your key communities - whether they are prospective parents, current parents, students/pupils, staff, governors, alumni, and neighbours.

The biggest challenge User Centric Design (UCD) has, is that what a client wants and what users want aren’t necessarily the same things. Ideally, most of the requirements of users and clients overlap, but inevitably there will be differences. We work with our university clients to ensure this overlap is clear, upfront and agreed before continuing into project deliverables.

We work with universities to help define user groups of key stakeholders and communities. This will ensure the end product (e.g. university website) is more likely to be successful. We encourage universities to create workshop forums to 'Poll' thoughts and opinions, likes and dislikes. We combine these with benchmarks learned from other universities and beyond into the corporate sector.

Only once we fully understand the 'User Requirements' do we engage in actually putting pen to paper - or mouse to PhotoShop palette! At this point our experienced university website designers 'come to life' and create your university a variety of amazing, fresh and unique university website designs to choose from.

We have a purpose built Usability Lab in High Wycombe (Buckinghamshire) - which is used for watching guinea pigs, moles (and even humans) perform amazing tasks as part of user experience testing. We are experts in understanding user behaviour traits when interacting with anything digital, from - university websites, interactive prospectuses, iPhone/iPad Apps, interactive video, CD/DVD and USBs, touch screen kiosks, email and mobile SMS.

Interactive Schools is a marketing company at it’s core – and through our other trading brand Intuition Media, provide strategic advice and implementation on 21st century marketing and communication solutions to clients like WHSmith, GAME, Walkers, Phones 4u, easyJet, EADS, Fast Track and the Mayor of London.

This User-Centric Design process helped put WHSmith at the top of the most usable eCommerce websites in the UK - in an independent review carried out by Webcredible.

// Download the full Webcredible eCommerce Usability Report

This experience is shared into our universities division, and as a result can offer workable and proven solutions to your university.