May 22, 2015, by Ryan Neal

What improvements does the new enquiry form offer?

You might remember that a couple of months ago we shared some first screenshots of the new enquiries form with you. As you are probably already aware, we have passed GoLive 1 and the new form is now being used by the central enquiry teams in China, the UK and Malaysia, the International Office, Nottingham University Business School, and the Schools of Economics and Health Sciences. In this blog post we’re going to take a look at the various functional improvements that this form offers over the previous forms.

As you can see from the screenshots below, up until now each School has had a different enquiry form on their website. Aside from providing fragmented branding and an inconsistent user experience, this also meant that, should a potential student have enquiries about more than one course, they’d have to navigate to the relevant enquiries page for each course.

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The new solution consists of one enquiry form that can capture enquiries against all campuses (UK, China and Malaysia), whether for undergraduate and foundation, postgraduate taught or postgraduate research.

With the new form, potential students can select any course that the University offers based on their selected year of entry. So if, for example, they navigate to the School of Economics enquiry form in order to ask a question about an undergraduate degree in Economics, but then decide that they also want to ask a question about a Masters in Mediterranean Archaeology, then they can do so all from the same page. This saves the prospect from having to find the relevant enquiry form and potentially abandoning their pursuit (see below).

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The form also provides the option for prospective students to order a prospectus or download it directly from the website:

Thanks to the enquiry form’s dynamic logic, a prospective student can download the prospectus relevant to them based on the details that they have already entered into the form. So if, for example, a student has indicated that they want to study an undergraduate degree at the UK campus, when they click ‘Download a prospectus now’, they will be taken to the UK undergraduate prospectus. If they have indicated that they want to undertake postgraduate research on the China campus, then they will be taken to UNNC’s postgraduate prospectus, and so on.

While the new enquiry form offers a number of direct user benefits, perhaps its greatest benefit will be to University staff and those prospective students who go on to study at the University of Nottingham.

This is because the data that it collects will form the basis for the student record system. Any student that submits a question through the enquiry form and then goes on to study at the University of Nottingham will already have their data entered into the University’s central system. Their entire student record up until the point of graduation and alumni status will then be built upon this initial interaction. What’s more, this is the first enquiry form that the University has had that feeds data into one central database; the prospective students who are currently submitting queries will be the first people to be recorded in this system!

The new enquiries form is currently being used by a select number of Schools and departments. It will be rolled out across the rest of the University in the GoLive 2 phase, which is scheduled for late September, so all Schools and departments will get a chance to use it!

Do you have any thoughts about the new enquiries form? Or maybe you’ve already been working with it and want to share your experiences. If so, let us know in the comments below!

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