Our team has been experimenting with a hybrid approach in working for the last few months. This has involved combining working from home, as we all have been doing for about a year and a half, and a gradual return to work on campus, mostly in Argyle House. We took this opportunity to openly discuss […]

The University of Edinburgh Design System   If you have not heard about the University of Edinburgh Design System then now is the time. With the creation of the new Web Publishing Platform comes an opportunity to evolve our Pattern Library (currently known as EdGEL) and create a one-stop-shop where you can easily reach for […]

It’s essential to build accessibility into your projects from the very beginning. For our Web Publishing Platform this doesn’t just mean that the website and its content needs to be accessible but the editorial interface of the content management system itself also needs to be accessible to as many people as possible. 

The Gov.uk Design System is internationally recognised as an example of design system best practice. The first Gov.uk Design System Day offered a valuable opportunity to learn how the system is run behind the scenes, and to apply this to the University Design System project. Read more about the project in the blog by Stratos […]

Human-centred Design System We are creating a human-centred, user-focused Design System for a community of over 50,000 people. Our challenge is to design and iterate upon a resource that helps our large, highly devolved estate to achieve coherence, for a population the size of a small town. The University Design System: a journey that has […]

Taking a product approach can be quite a culture shift for a team. Sometimes we are more used to working on ‘projects’ where we tend to work on more discrete blocks of work and often aren’t the people who run the future service. The team who are developing the software might never meet the users […]

Components are an important part of any Design System, and the Design System we’re building for the University is no exception. Each component can have various pieces of data describing it, its history and its uses, which can be presented in various ways. This piece of work was about exploring the documentation options for components […]

As the project to build the new web publishing platform continues apace, we used the project roadmap to define a process and a plan of user experience design activities to help achieve our milestones and keep us on track. The web publishing platform project (or the WPP project as it’s come to be known) has […]

As part of the programme of user experience research for the latest phase of the Learn Foundations project, Learn Foundations teamed up with colleagues from Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) and the User Experience and Digital Consultancy Service to conduct usability testing. The programme of user experience research for Phase 3 of the Learn Foundations Project sought to understand how Learn […]

Over 200 people from around the University participated in our latest top task survey looking at the diverse needs of our large and devolved Web Publishing Community.