Lindsay Bann (Student Success and Development Manager)

Lindsay is based in the Directorate of Student Experience.  Her responsibilities include a range of co-curricular and extra-curricular activities including volunteering. The Stellify Award, Peer Support, Student Partnerships, and Welcome, Induction and Transition (WIT). She is also currently undertaking an ITL Fellowship focusing on the development of PEL.

Chiachi Ming (Research Associate on Student-centred Design Projects)

Ming is a service designer who has spent the past 5 years working across the public sector, charities, and grassroots communities, with a strong focus on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. Advocating for human-centred design, she believes in creating inclusive space where diverse narratives of needs inform services, and creates bridges that bring students and staff together.

Started in late 2025, the WIT project aims to give students a more comprehensive start of university life in their first semester. This project placed our student needs at the centre, by adopting a human-centred design approach and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs framework. So far, our progress includes:

• Identification of student challenges through 1-1 in-depth conversation with 17 students and 6 staff
• Co-creation of ideas to address challenges through 2 design workshops (one with 7 students, one with 40+ staff from different service teams across the university)

We’d like to share our reflection throughout the process with two blogs. Blog one focuses on the project setup, blog two focuses on the staff co-creation workshop and our next steps.

Q1: Why does Welcome, Induction and Transition support matter?

Lindsay: We know that students are regularly told that their university lives will be wonderful.  They will meet their friends for life in the first few days, join lots of societies and be living their best lives.  We also know that for many students this is not the reality. Many are homesick, they struggle to find their people and are challenged by the shift in learning style. Some suffer imposter syndrome or struggle with the reality of living in a big city, managing their finances, feeding themselves and all the other new things that come with coming to university. They don’t feel safe, they don’t have a sense of belonging, are not sure they matter to anyone, and they think they are the only ones feeling like this. Without these foundations it’s unsurprising that they struggle academically.  Whilst there are pockets of really good practice in the University they are inconsistent, so it really is a programme lottery as to whether a student gets the support they need to transition into university life successfully or not.

Ming: Let me share a student story from our interviews:

An international undergraduate student missed welcome week, because she was on scholarship and had to wait for the university to confirm her flight to Manchester. She arrived in week 2 and found induction quite overwhelming. At the same time, she was trying to settle in, collecting her ID, completing registrations, meeting new people, and catching up on missed information. She felt discouraged by the volume of emails and unsure of where to start. She wished there had been an online version of Welcome or a late-arrival package, so she wouldn’t feel like she had already fallen behind.

Students are often expected to arrive before Welcome Week but this is not always the case. Travel delays, visa issues, or personal circumstances can disrupt it. Many of our services follow the long-established processes and systems. But do they always work well from a student perspective? The first semester can set the tone for our students. It’s not only about study, but also learning how to navigate the university, find support, and feel that they belong.

Q2: What were the initial ideas behind the WIT project?

Lindsay: I inherited Welcome, induction and Transition in 2022 but staffing challenges (there is no Welcome team, just a group of staff pulled together from other areas for the duration) meant that whilst we got to grips with Welcome Week itself quite quickly, the longer induction and transition element always felt slightly out of our grasp.  In reality, we collapsed on the sofa on the Friday evening of Welcome Week every year with the mindset that it was done for another year and everyone went back to their ‘day jobs’.

Whilst there were conversations about an extended Welcome, sometimes called a 100 day Welcome, it took a chance conversation at a Teaching and Learning event about our aspiration to do more for something to happen.  The support for a few months of a Research Assistant (Ming!) who was looking for a project was offered and this felt like a catalyst to finally manage to get the ball rolling.

Q3: Why did we use human-centred design approach?

Ming: When new students first arrive at the university, a good service means all our students can find, understand and use without having to ask for help. However, support services in higher education can feel fragmented because they are often organised by functions and teams, rather than around student’s whole journey. For example, information to navigate different support services is scattered across multiple platforms. This requires more energy, which can lead to disengagement.

Human-centred design (HCD) is a powerful approach to capture students’ journeys from end to end. By focusing on student journeys, we were able to connect different services and rethink support from a more joined-up student perspective.

Q4: How did you work together throughout the project?

Lindsay: Working with Ming gave us the chance to sit back and think.  I had undertaken some HCD training a few months before and had understood how powerful it could be but in reality it felt complicated, I didn’t feel confident deploying it fully myself and didn’t have the time to take it forward. By having someone with the expertise there was a safety net, Ming led us through the process (and did most of the work!) and was able to demonstrate how intuitive and easy it actually was.

Ming: This was a collaborative project, where each of us brought different strengths and perspectives. As a service designer, I brought a HCD approach that created a structured way of working with the student experience at the core. This helped bring in student voice, explored the problems, turned insights into ideas, and put them into practice. Lindsay and her team brought rich knowledge of the University’s support services, how the system operates, and how to connect with the right people. They also helped identify priority student groups and made it possible to reach and engage them.

Because this project involved multiple services and diverse student groups, their expertise was essential. Together, we made sure that the work was grounded in student lived experiences and moved forward in a clear way.

Q5: What stood out to you throughout the project?

Lindsay: When we have busy work lives the norm is to jump straight to solutions and new initiatives. HCD stopped us doing this and made us take time to really drill down into the problems and challenges, why they occurred and only then to consider what might improve those situations for our students. The process showed how interlinked so many areas are and how a more holistic approach is needed. Who would have thought that a student’s reluctance to speak in seminars might come from the fact that he is very conscious of having a strong black country accent and not having anyone around him who sounds like him, or a student’s absence from late afternoon lectures is because she hasn’t made any friends and therefore leaves campus early because she’s walking alone and wants to be home before dark? So often the issues students were struggling with were nothing to do with their academic ability but the other things going on in their lives.

Ming: What struck me most was the complexity of student needs. In our 1-1 conversations, many students described feeling overwhelmed. One student shared that they worked 25 hours a week, commuted 1.5h daily, and struggled with imposter syndrome. They only reached out for exam support when everything fell apart.

These pressures build up quickly. Many students don’t access support early, often not only because they aren’t aware of it, but unsure how to engage. This highlights the need for a more thoughtful induction and transition experience, which not only provides information, but also helps students build confidence to navigate support.

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