UCL Grand Challenges

The UCL Grand Challenges programme was created to bring together research experts from education, industry, and innovation to address society's most urgent challenges. After 15 years, the programme was given fresh investment, a new team, and a clear strategic direction in UCL’s Strategic Plan 2022–2027.

The UCL Grand Challenges team enlisted That Web Person to create a website strategy to support these changes, allowing them to focus on developing new themes and delivering their programme plan.

The UCL Grand Challenges team needed expert, reliable help to guide them through the web development process. With new themes and a fresh direction, they wanted clear, practical advice to create a website that improved their content quality and engaged their audiences.

Our initial meeting identified the following objectives and challenges.

Project Objectives

• Enhance user experience: Improve content, navigation, accessibility, and design to facilitate easier access to information and resources to their target audiences. 

• Increase engagement: Focus content to actively engage specific users and promote collaboration among existing and potential researchers, external partners and students.

• Improve content development and management: Develop a flexible content management plan to adapt to programme growth and provide clear guidelines for maintaining the site and effectively telling the story.  

• Strengthen SEO and analytics: Optimise the site for search engines and provide the training and tools to adapt to user behaviour to improve analytic results.

• Amplify UCL's role as a global leader: Position UCL as a pioneering academic and research institution. One that influences global responses to societal issues, enhances education through curricular and extracurricular activities and improves collaborations with government, industry, and community partners. 

Challenges

As mentioned above, with a new team, new themes and ambitious plans, this project had a specific set of challenges.

• Evolving themes - The Grand Challenges programme was still evolving. There were few success stories for the new Themes, although there were some historic impacts from previous themes.

• Resource gap - Without a communication professional in post, and with priorities for the Grand Challenges team focused elsewhere, there was limited capacity for content creation, review feedback or ongoing maintenance.

• Technical uncertainty—with no UCL intranet, internal content has always been mixed into public-facing sites. Moreover, a new version of Drupal was starting to be rolled out across UCL, but it was unclear when the Grand Challenges site would be upgraded.

Strategy and Execution

To ensure the solution was focused on the user, the project started with a detailed scoping phase followed by a comprehensive content development phase.

1. Data-driven analysis: Conducting a thorough Google Analytics review and industry comparison provided insights into user behaviour and best practices in industry standards.

2. Content audit: An extensive audit of nearly 700 live and over 200 draft web pages identified redundancies, broken links, and outdated content, streamlining the site's content.

3. User research: Online questionnaires and one-on-one stakeholder interviews provided valuable feedback, shaping the site's direction and content focus.

4. Site architecture redesign: A new site structure was developed, focusing on user navigation and content accessibility.

5. Content development: The content was re-written from fluffy brochure-style text into concise, web-friendly copy designed for scanning and engaging online audiences.

6. Testing and validation: User experience techniques like tree-jack surveys ensured the new structure met user expectations and industry benchmarks.

Recommendations

It was clear, that to boost user engagement, the internal and external content needed to be separate, allowing each audience to have a tailored experience.

Regular updates were essential to maintain relevance, and calls to action, needed to be specific, clear and action-orientated.

Reorganising the site architecture was critical to streamlining content development and management. This included providing clear templates for content creation and ensuring consistency and ease of use for the team.

To position UCL as a global leader, the focus of the site’s messages needed to shift - highlighting UCL’s interdisciplinary leadership and showcasing the expertise of its people, alongside the impacts of its themes and successes.

Key Achievements

1. User-centric and insight-driven design: Reorganised the site architecture based on insights from extensive stakeholder interviews, aligning content with user needs and team capabilities.

2. Tailored content strategy: Delivered a clear separation of internal and external content to meet diverse audience needs—enhancing UCL’s external positioning as a global leader while fostering internal engagement and pride.

3. Empowering the team: Equipped the team with reusable content templates, guidance on writing audience-focused, web-friendly content, and tools for maintaining and evolving the site without additional support.

4. Focus on impact and collaboration: Refocused the site’s content to highlight the programme’s successes, interdisciplinary expertise, and opportunities for collaboration, supporting both user’s and team's goals.

5. Strategic alignment: Delivered a site that not only supports UCL Grand Challenges’ global mission but also provides a strong foundation for ongoing updates and engagement.

Conclusion

The highlight of this six-month project with the UCL Grand Challenges team was handing over a site into safe hands.

The scoping phase gave the team the clarity and confidence to ensure the site delivered the right messages to the right audiences. By focusing on external communications, the UCL Research team can now showcase their leadership in the Grand Challenge research themes—highlighting the best people, resources, and results. The internal site can showcase the things that matter to staff and students - how Grand Challenges can support their career development and raise their profile.

The content plan and training equipped the team with the skills and confidence to maintain and grow the site as the programme evolves and new successes emerge.

The project was a rewarding collaboration with the team. It was an honour to contribute to such an impactful initiative, and I’m proud of the trust that made this project a success.

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