Building My Liverpool – From problems to portal
Posted on: 26 November 2024 in Meet our Team
In IT Services we’re always looking for the best way to improve your digital experience at our University by solving problems with innovative solutions.
Phil Stratford, Software Engineering Manager, shares how building My Liverpool, the new student portal, contributes to this aim and how, by utilising your feedback, My Liverpool will continue to be improved.
What problems was My Liverpool built to solve?
Before launching My Liverpool, our students had two places to go for information: Liverpool Life and the student intranet, and both were accessed through different logins. Obviously, this isn’t the best experience for anyone, and we wanted to build one product where our students could get everything they needed easily.
Liverpool Life was also very old and out-of-date software needs to be replaced to keep you and our University secure.
Building a new product where everything was there for our students also gave us the opportunity to improve the overall experience, and as a result of that work, My Liverpool has a modern look and feel, with better navigation and improved accessibility.
How did you build My Liverpool?
We collaborated with Student Systems and completed a full audit of everything in Liverpool Life, including the staff facing elements and reviewed how it linked with other University systems.
We found 54 discrete features in Liverpool Life so there was a lot to move over to the new portal! The biggest feature was academic registration where students input all their personal information annually, so completion of this was high priority and this was the sole feature when the new portal initially went live in January 2024.
Over the next six months, my team made further developments, while Student Systems wrote Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to ensure all data from Banner fed through to My Liverpool. Our Customer Experience Design team produced the sleek and accessible look and feel you experience in My Liverpool ensuring that accessibility was considered throughout the design process.
We worked with staff across the University to test functionality and utilised their feedback to make the product the very best it could be for the go live of all former Liverpool Life features in June 2024 when Liverpool Life was switched off.
The final stage to launch My Liverpool on 22 October 2024, was the movement of all student intranet content and now we have moved from two separate systems with two separate logins, to one sleek and easy to use portal, with enhanced security through the utilisation of Single Sign-On (SSO) and Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA).
What’s next for My Liverpool?
New features on the horizon for My Liverpool include an AI powered chatbot to help with your queries in real time.
Students can input into the future of My Liverpool by joining our Student Digital Engagement Group (StuDEG), a community of students the University calls upon to help us research and test our digital products. All new My Liverpool features will be available to the StuDEG for feedback and your ideas will be welcomed.
Staff across the University have been consulted on the future of My Liverpool and IT Services will continue to work with our colleagues on new features and improving the My Liverpool experience.
You can stay up to date with the latest developments of My Liverpool and other improvements made by IT Services by following us on Instagram and LinkedIn. You can also receive updates straight to your inbox by signing up to our newsletter, YOUR I.T. Insight.
Keywords: My Liverpool, Student, University of Liverpool, Software engineering, student portal.