This is a joint blog with reflections from Katie Spearman and Mel Batcharj from the User Experience Service who attended the conference. This year the conference was online The ContentEd conference this year was a two-day event held completely online. There were some definite pros to this approach – there was a packed line up […]

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 […]

The UX Service launched a new version of the Effective Digital Content online course in May this year. You can read about how we built the new version of the course in previously published blogs: Our six-part series on building the Effective Digital Content course​ Six practical tips: what we learnt building a new online […]

On 30 October, I was delighted to attend Scottish Web Folk at the University of Dundee. This was the second time I’d attended this particular conference – you can read about my previous experience here: Scottish Web Folk 2024: A portal practitioner’s perspective Generative AI was a major theme from both suppliers and institutions There […]

Content Improvement Club is our regular meetup for web publishers. This month, we focused on how to make web content easier to use by applying a nine-step editing process called ‘Editing that works’. After taking a break over the summer, Content Improvement Club returned with a session in September held in person at the Edinburgh […]

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 […]