A unified education website

Goals

The website will improve the service for prospective students by providing them with quick answers to FAQs, helping them to understand the available education opportunities and providing support and guidance in the choice of course or degree programme.

The project also aims to produce course and programme presentations that are welcoming and which make prospective students feel that they want to apply to Lund University regardless of background, age or life situation. The presentations are to reflect that Lund University is an attractive place to be as a student.

The project strives to create a solution in which staff feel that their expertise is best utilised and the organisation feels it has joint ownership of the education website.
The introduction of the new unified education website is planned for early February 2026.

Project tracks

In 2025, activities will proceed in several areas in parallel and be integrated with each other. The project has two main tracks:

• Product development
• Product introduction.

Product development

This project track is to develop a design and content structure for a unified presentation of Lund University’s courses and programmes on lu.se and lunduniversity.lu.se for the target group of prospective students.

The main deliverables are:

• Education pages for courses and programmes
• Presentation pages for areas of interest and subjects
• Search page for courses and programmes
• Context pages – pages related to courses and programmes that describe the context for the studies.

The project track is to develop a technical solution for content management using a Product Information Management (PIM) system. The design is to be implemented as webviews in Drupal with the PIM system acting as the content source.

The PIM system is a supplement to the more administrative information in the education databases Lubas and ProPlan (LTH), and also creates a structure for more communicative content – presentation texts, images, videos etc.

The PIM system enables:

• new functionality, e.g. associations between courses and programmes
• advanced categorisation and tagging
• distributed publication.

Design and content structure

Development of the new design and content structure for the unified education website is being conducted in three phases:

• Concept design
• Design principles
• Detailed design.

In the spring of 2024, the concept design entered an iterative process. Hypotheses and prototypes were produced and tested on prospective students. Operations representatives could follow the work through three demo sessions. The design team met staff from all the faculties and from the Central Administration that in different ways are involved in the process of producing education information. The design concept was further developed and refined based on the insights that emerged into student needs and behaviour.

In the autumn of 2024, the focus of the work shifted to the design principles phase. The concept was mapped out against a content inventory, to ensure that important information elements have a place in the new design. The design sketches were evaluated from different operational perspectives, e.g. technical conditions, national and international conditions and the framework entailed by Lund University’s design system. The project also stress tested the sketches by applying them to "edge cases”, i.e. courses and programmes with special structures and needs.

Gradually, various parts of the design principles that are ready have progressed to detailed design work. In this phase, the project’s designers and operations specialists work closely with the two technical teams – there is one team for the PIM system, and one for webviews in Drupal. The web presentation is gradually starting to take shape before the launch.

Design of the technical solution 

In 2024, the current status at an overall level was charted regarding content and work processes for education information and related IT systems. A goal was drawn up for continuation of the work. The next step was to define and design the future solution in broad terms. This concerns, among other things, data models, integrations and the adaptations that are to be made to the selected PIM system. Based on this, Lund University’s version of the PIM system, Akeneo CE, is being constructed. 

In parallel, Drupal developers, operations specialists and designers are working to construct new webpages with links to the information in the PIM system.

When the technical platform is sufficiently developed, work can start on filling the PIM system with content.

Product introduction

This project track is to produce a solution for how work on the education content is to be organised:

• Quality-assured work processes
• Roles, responsibilities and authorisations in an editorial base organisation
• Launch of new working methods, internal courses and support functions
• Recommendations for continued development of the working methods and organisation
• Structure for the management of a unified education website.

Work on content is proceeding in the introduction track in parallel with the design work. The various organisational levels at Lund University will be involved throughout 2025 in producing content for course and programme presentations, based on the needs identified during the design work.

The organisation and work processes

In 2024, the project focused on:

• completing a current status inventory which included interviews with different parts of the organisation that are involved in education information
• establishing and leading an internal working group that produced a structure for quality-assured work processes, roles, areas of responsibility and authorisations for an editorial base organisation
• completing and establishing support for the structure of an editorial base organisation
• developing courses and programmes, support material and support functions
• staffing and training an editorial base organisation.

In 2025, the project is focusing on:

• drawing up recommendations and continuing development of the working methods and organisation
• leading and supporting the organisation’s work on editorial content for the unified education website
• training the organisation’s appointed publicists (just over 100) in editorial content work and use of the new PIM system.

Background

The preliminary project "A unified web experience for education” observed that the current presentation of courses and programmes online does not meet the needs and expectations of prospective students. There is also considerable potential for improvement in how we work internally at Lund University on the presentation of courses and programmes. 

The preliminary project led to the initiation of the project "A unified education website”.

Vision project 2022-2023

The project “A unified web experience for education” carried out a user survey involving a broad group of prospective students of different ages and with various backgrounds and interests regarding studies.

The results were compiled in a visualised user journey, “The journey for prospective students”, and in a number of main insights and archetypes. The survey also included internal interviews and workshops with staff members at Lund University who contribute to the content that presents our courses and programmes. 

The results of the survey were shown to LU staff at an exhibition at Skissernas Museum in February 2023.