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Future student online experiences

Future student online experiences

Sharing the work of the Prospective Student Web Team

Attending a World Usability Day event

Last month, I attended a World Usability Day (WUD) event at User Vision, a UX and service design agency in Edinburgh. By sharing my experience I hope it helps others to decide if they want to attend an event in the future.

About World Usability Day

World Usability Day (WUD) is single day (11th November) of events occurring around the world that brings together communities of professional, industrial, educational, citizen, and government groups for a common objective: to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use. 

Learn more about World Usability Day: organiser’s website with more information on current and past events

Each year WUD adopts a theme and this year it was of particular interest to me: accessibility.

It’s an area that myself and the rest of my team are eager to develop in to help make the digital services we design more inclusive and accessible for all University users. 

World Usability Day at User Vision

Unfortunately, User Vision don’t provide an itinerary of events beforehand so it’s about turning up on the day to find out what activities have been planned. It’s also a short event that runs just in the afternoon.

Their office in Edinburgh is not the most spacious and is certainly not designed to accommodate the amount of people who attend the event so you may not be able to attend the activity you want due to room capacity. They do offer overflow rooms where you can watch the activity live on a screen but some of these rooms get cramped and become very warm! 

Event highlights 

People

Talking to people often turns out to be the highlight of events that I have attended over the years. It’s a great way to learn how others are approaching similar problems to me outside of higher education.  

I had an interesting conversation with someone who worked for a cyber security firm that provided software for live monitoring of threats. It gave me some insight into their current problem – how to perform UX benchmarking.  

It’s something that Neil and I have talked about in relation to the future state degree finder, so it was interesting to learn about their challenge of identifying the correct methodology and product to measure users’ experience of their product. 

Learn more about UX benchmarking: article on what to consider if you want to conduct UX benchmarking

Using a digital service with an accessibility need

Devices were set up for a mock-up digital service where you could complete typical tasks like navigation and form completion but used software that simulated a visual impairment.  

I hadn’t experienced this before, and it got me thinking about what benefit simulation tools might have in future design work and if they can help bring us closer to what the user experience is like for different accessibility needs. 

Usability testing our beta programme page

User Vision offered attendees the opportunity to bring their product along for some usability testing with someone from the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).  

I was keen to take this opportunity so spent some time with Keith Allan, Principal Accessibility Consultant, before the event creating a usability session guide to use on the day.  

I was interested to see what the experience would be like for a user with a visual impairment using our new in-page navigation design on a mobile device because I don’t have access to users with accessibility needs for usability testing.

It turned out that our new programme page performed brilliantly for him!  

The improvements we made to the sizing and spacing of content on the new programme page meant it was easy for him to scan and read information. Users with visual impairments often need to isolate elements on a page to zoom in and he noted how this helped him do that.

He also told us that colour contrasting of the different elements for the in-page navigation component meant it was easy for him to interact with it and use it to navigate the page.

Resources on designing for accessibility

The positive experience I observed in the usability test was a result of our team following good accessibility standards that others have used.  

Here are some resources that I have found useful and hope others will too:

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1: document that covers a wide range of recommendations for making web content more accessible 

GOV.UK design system: learn from one of the best by looking at how they design accessible digital services 

How updates to accessibility guidelines are impacting GOV.UK: blog post from GOV.UK on how they are preparing for a new requirement for accessibility specifically for UK government digital services  

Disability simulators: article on tools that can be used to simulate how people with different disabilities might experience your digital service

The future of designing for accessibility: an article by Jakob Nielsen on how generative AI might provide the solution to meeting the challenges of designing accessible digital services in the future

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