Can I borrow your homework?

The higher education digital sector is a funny old place. I’ve met lots of people who lead digital teams from the Russell Group, from post-1992 universities and several from overseas. It’s incredible how many of them speak about the same challenges at work that I experience too:

• Large numbers of website editors making sub-standard content
• Procured and in-house digital solutions outside of their control that don’t consider user experience enough
• Challenges with devolution of power across the institute, fighting against central digital policy, strategy and governance
• Small teams spread thinly across giant portfolios
• SharePoint implementations for Intranets being a car crash

I’ll probably write more about those bullet points another time…

Inspired by how, as well as what

I think some universities handle all this really well and have found organisational models and transformation projects that have had a real impact. Take Southampton’s OneWeb and UAL’s product approach for example.

I choose to take inspiration from these sorts of conversations and learn from how they made change work for them. However, I do know that copying them simply won’t work. There are many contextual differences between us and them – many of which I’m probably not even aware of.

I want to bring these insights to my work, so I will add their influences to the mix when doing some hard thinking about how we can make things better. But that hard thinking has to happen.

Blinded by the shiny lights

But, strangely, when it comes to gathering information and getting inspiration from competitor analysis on digital solutions and features, we approach it quite differently.

We often get caught up with what other places are working on and fixate on a desire to simply be like them. Why is that?

I’ve heard it from across the full spectrum of roles at the University:

“Why don’t we just have the same navigation as they do?”.

“We need our homepage to be more like this Russell Group university”.

“We need a course comparison feature like they have”.

I’m all for competitor analysis. I promise I am. I just can’t face starting work on something just because someone else has it. I want to know why we need it.

What about intuition?

Don’t get me wrong… I advocate for using a “hunch” to get things started where lack of data exists, but when we’re picking features from other websites, we seem to be bedazzled by shiny things. We have to look deeper and understand if our hunches needs validating.

There are some no-brainer features which we’re missing on our website. We can line up the user needs, business value and technical effort in a way that we can already see value is clear in order to prioritise that.

But some things we can’t be so sure about. Some features simply show no evidence for adding value if we were to implement them. Also, looking around and seeing something that you already like the sound of is a classic route to confirmation bias.

Case in point – I mentioned course comparison tools. That’s a fair bit of effort for us to put together and maintain… do users do that comparison elsewhere? What if the data we show users to compare is actually identical? Does it add significant return on investment?

It is fine to take that inspiration, but we need to do some discovery work first.

Fork in the road

While it is important to learn from your competitors, it is not enough to imitate them.

We’re at a fork in the road and I need to ensure we take the right turn:
1. Do as others do and think less about what our users need from our services.
2. Consider more about what our users are thinking and react to that, reviewing what the competition is up to for understanding our place in the market and for inspiration.

I vote #2.