On Tuesday 8 October Duncan Stephen will talk to us about his recent experience completing a professional development course with the Service Design Academy.

As part of our series of usability testing showcases in collaboration with the Learn Foundations project, we worked with the School of Law to uncover usability issues witnessed when staff are using Learn.

Over the summer we ran co-design events involving over 100 participants from a variety of areas of the University. This work has given us a fresh perspective on the range of web activities undertaken across the University, and is informing our next steps as we continue our project to develop the new web publishing platform and services.

We had developed an information architecture and tree tests as part of our programme of user research for Learn Foundations. The next step was to use first click tests to pit the new template against existing courses.

This year I have had the fantastic opportunity to study with the Service Design Academy. This intensive course in service design has given me hands-on experience in new techniques.

After completing the top tasks survey and the card sort as part of the Learn Foundations project, our next step was to create a prototype information architecture and test it.

I have a 5 year old starting school in 5 days. In navigating the brave new world of scholarly life, I’m already seeing basic UX mistakes that are mirrored in university culture.

We had a full house at our latest User Experience Service showcase on 23 July, with a focus on research and design conducted for business critical services: EASE authentication, Card Services, EdWeb and Learn. In this post I’ll share videos of the lightning talks and provide an overview of the session.

The UX team have recently been helping to ensure an upgraded EASE offers an improved user experience. In this post I tell the story of how we redesigned the interface – focusing heavily on microcopy – and the outcomes of doing so.

On August 13, we will apply a collection of development work and bug fixes to EdWeb. These include an image gallery, accordion element, easier ways to provide video on EdWeb pages, and a new Landing Page content type. These developments were funded by Communications and Marketing and the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.