COMPUTING & IT RESOURCES
The digital experience that shapes student success from day one
W
e hear from Cheryl Watson, VP Education, UK at TechnologyOne. Universities are rightly focused on student success. They invest heavily in teaching, support services and the wider student experience because they want every student to get off to the best possible start.
That experience now begins long before a student walks into a lecture theatre. For most students, university starts with a login. Before they arrive on campus, they’re enrolling, checking their
timetable, working out what happens next and looking for answers to the questions that inevitably come with starting somewhere new. Those first interactions matter more than we often acknowledge. If they’re straightforward, students can focus on settling in. If they’re confusing, confidence starts to slip before teaching has even begun. This is particularly important at the start of university, when students are already navigating a lot of change. They are learning how their course works, getting used to a new environment and figuring out where to go when they need help. A digital experience that makes those first steps clear and simple can take some of that uncertainty away.
The opposite is also true. When a student has to search across multiple websites, log into different systems or work out which team can answer a simple question, the frustration isn’t necessarily with the technology. It becomes part of their perception of the university itself.
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Students see one university, not the systems behind it September is one of the busiest times of the year for any university. Registry teams are processing enrolments, student services are responding to thousands of enquiries and academic staff are preparing for the year ahead. Behind the scenes, there is a huge amount of coordination. But students don’t see any of that.
They aren’t thinking about which department owns a process or where their information is stored. They simply expect the university to work. That expectation is entirely reasonable. If a student needs to update their details or ask for support, it feels like one task from their perspective. It doesn’t matter whether completing it requires information from admissions, registry, IT or student services. They just want to know what they need to do and where to go next.
That is why the digital experience has become far more than an information hub. It’s often the first real experience students have of their university. It should do more than display a timetable or point someone towards a webpage. It should help students understand what they need to do next and make it easy to access support when they need it. In many ways, the digital experience has become an extension of a university’s reputation.
A university can have excellent teaching and outstanding support services, but if a student repeatedly encounters unnecessary friction when trying to access them, that quality is harder to see. The digital experience is increasingly the front door to those services, and it needs to reflect the same standard of experience that universities want to provide elsewhere.
The challenge isn’t more technology
Universities have invested significantly in technology over the years. The issue is rarely a lack of systems. More often, it’s that those systems have been introduced at different times to solve different problems.
September 2026
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