For the past year I have been part of a UX task force developing the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines. As the guidelines reach the milestone of Draft Note status, I reflect on what they stand to achieve, and share insights from our process to make these guidelines as useful and usable as possible. Increasingly, websites […]

Continuing our UX research on AI features, we worked with the EdHelp team to design and run user tests to learn how students respond to their ELM-enhanced online enquiry service, AskEdHelp. This post documents our methods, findings and recommendations.  The inclusion of AI in online experiences is becoming the norm, and at the University, the […]

Last year, our Green Digital Design Intern audited the Edinburgh Innovations website for digital sustainability, and made several recommendations. This year’s internship went further – researching how users actually interacted with the site and uncovering potential to improve both the site’s UX and its environmental impact. In 2024 the UX Service and the wider Website […]

Building on the success of our in-person UX conference last year, I worked with UCISA to organise and run a hybrid UX Community Day. It succeeded in bringing together 185 professionals from 60 institutes for a day of peer-to peer UX knowledge exchange. I reflect on organising an impactful and enriching event. Having ran the […]

With nine talks on topics ranging from Object-Oriented UX to Single Directory Components to image-management, DrupalCamp Scotland 2025 packed a lot into a day. I left with new insights, feedback on my work, and plenty of ideas for my University and Drupal UX leadership roles. Drupal is a highly capable, flexible and secure open-source content […]

I enjoyed taking part in the Digital Leaders Summit for 2025, organised by Boye & Co and hosted at the University of Cambridge. We achieved a lot in a single day – sharing work and ideas and discussing trends and challenges in digital leadership across multiple sectors. In my role running the University’s UX Service, […]

Now in its third year, the annual Scottish Web Folk conference was organised and hosted by the brilliant Web Services team at the University of Dundee on 30 October. Nick, Katie and Emma from the UX Service enjoyed attending and delivering presentations. Here, they reflect on their highlights from a brilliant day of learning and […]

In January, the UX team spent a day ideating on how to apply Drupal AI to University web content management and built a prototype including an AI-powered search feature. But would students find it useful and usable? Preliminary UX research revealed useful insights. Search is an aspect of web content management that is notoriously difficult […]

This summer, Digital Content Style Guide Intern Mostafa Ebid integrated ELM into EdWeb2 in a Generative AI tool aimed at helping web publishers prepare content. He tested it with a sample of participants to make an initial assessment of the user experience it provided in the context of assisting them with web publishing tasks. After […]

The University holds a vast collection of digitised artefacts including images, manuscripts and artworks, accessed through a central digital collections platform. The Digital Collections team asked for UX support with a project to redesign the platform front-end, to help ensure it served needs and expectations of platform users. Following a piece of work to develop […]