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We want to be able to provide our users with useful content relevant to them to help provide an integrated experience as part of a University of Kent community.
We’ve been working towards an integrated experience for students.
One way to move towards greater consistency was introducing the “Kent bar” – a light branding element that can be used consistently on key students systems.
Beta has provided us the opportunity to develop this further and to incorporate greater personalisation.
The Kent bar is being improved and integrated into the beta design as an audience bar.
This acts as a replacement for the current quick links on the old site. Students and staff can easily select the most popular systems and services, with an autocomplete to help them find other ones.
We’ve also made it easier to search for departments.
Getting personal
We want the Kent bar to be more than only quick links. How can we make the audience bar more relevant to students and staff?
There are various systems and services planned to be or being redeveloped and improved. Particularly KentVision/SDS, Kent IT account and online directory.
This provides opportunities to develop APIs so that data from systems can be made portable and integrated into the Kent bar for specific users and potentially extended to a mobile app.
We also had a hack day which provided some ideas for personalisation.
For example, once logged in to the Kent IT account, the Kent bar could eventually show you:
- notifications for your deadlines
- alerts for important tasks such as module registration
- when and where your next upcoming lecture is
- alerts about Library due dates
- the status of different services
- personalised content on the Student Guide/Campus online relevant to your role or course
As always, having enough resource is a challenge in achieving this.
Ultimately our vision is to move towards a better, integrated experience for our students and staff.