Last month I was honoured to receive a national award for Outstanding Leadership from industry body UCISA, recognising my work driving positive change through UX. This achievement prompted me to reflect on my experiences leading UX in different realms over the past few years, and to think about what UX leadership means to me.
Content Improvement Club is our regular meetup for web publishers. In our March session, with a focus on accessibility, we explored how effective use of links and headings can make content easier to navigate and use.
After Stratos’s blog post last week, I revisited Joshua Mitchell’s experiment asking an AI to simulate what using a screen reader actually feels like, not to replace proper testing, but to generate a transcript of the experience that could be shared with stakeholders who had never encountered one. The results were striking: skip links that […]
The Role of Profiles project produced 10 recommendations for an improved University profile provision. To start actioning these, I assembled a working group of specialists and drew on UX design principles – implementing practical prioritisation while seeking innovative solutions that addressed the research findings.
Drupal is the University’s content management system and Drupal CMS – its new ready-to-use site-building product – is developing apace. As Drupal UX Research Lead, I’ve used concept testing to gather quick insights that keep interface decisions user-focused and keep development moving.
From the birthplace of the original Industrial Revolution, a group of around 2000 intrepid EdTech practitioners and enthusiasts sought to examine and understand what has been dubbed the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution.’ I was fortunate to be among them for Jisc Digifest 2026 in Birmingham this week. There were many opportunities to contribute and get creative […]
Following a successful launch of Effective Digital Content, our internal course that staff complete to learn and practice fundamental content design skills, the UX Service saw an opportunity to make the course more widely available, on the University’s Short Courses platform.
A couple of weeks ago, I packed my notebook and headed to London for two back-to-back events organised by Boye & Co: The UK Digital Leaders meeting and CMS Experts. After two days and a lot of discussions with the support of quality coffee, and delicious Thai and Indian food, I took the train back […]
This year the User Experience Service have been working on improving the University’s editorial style guide. Nick Daniels, Hannah Watson and I have blogged about previous aspects of this work: Why we’re refreshing the editorial style guide An analysis of responses to our editorial style guide survey Reviewing and rewriting the formatting section of the […]
There is an expression that is used more and more when referencing use of AI, and makes me uncomfortable: “Keeping the human in the loop”. I, instead, believe we need to ensure that we “Keep the human in the middle”. What is more relevant with this then, other than reflecting on the impact, negative but […]
