Multibranding – representing the University brand alongside partner brands to accurately reflect partnerships without compromising our own integrity  – is a design challenge shared across the University. The aesthetics aspect of multibranding is particularly important to get right. As part of the Design System project, we are planning a two-part community event aimed at developing […]

Representing brands of University partners to accurately reflect collaborations whilst ensuring integrity of the University brand is a complex, widespread issue. As part of the Design System project, I ran a session where University staff came together to work on the governance aspect of multibranding by collectively structuring a checklist. 

When talking about technology, achieving understanding without confusion can be difficult, but communicating about technical concepts and processes is crucial for the success of our services. To achieve our aim of a more unified and coherent approach to technical communication across the University, the UX service has begun a new project to map the use […]

Over the summer we have had the wonderful opportunity to work with Annika Sybrandy, our Behavioural Insights (Nudge) Intern. There are lots of parallels between behavioural science and human-centred approaches. Nudge models give us the opportunity to bring an extra level of formality to our approaches.

We all want to believe that we have free will and make our own decisions. This may only be partly true. You may realize that the way options present themselves influences your decisions. You might not realize that a whole science is dedicated to engineering the way to present choices and guide your behavior.   Nudging […]

Have you ever shopped online and received a notification that there is only limited stock of an item available? If you are like most people, these alerts will nudge you over the edge to purchase the item now. There are only a few left, after all! This is an example of how marketers use behavioural […]

As we draw ever nearer to starting our content migration from EdWeb into our new Web Publishing Platform it’s time to answer all the most prominent questions we’ve been getting over the past few weeks.

There is a gorgeous quote by Robert Cailliau, during his introduction to the first World Wide Web conference in Geneva, 1994. “I have seen many interesting applications of the web, and many interesting pieces of software… There is a garden of green plants out there, growing very fast! We should take care it develops into […]

As part of the new Web Publishing Platform project, we needed a way to test ideas for new navigational approaches, to get feedback to inform iterative design. We used testing platform Maze to run remote, unmoderated tests on navigational prototypes built using design tool Figma, to gain quick insights from large numbers of users.

We used Figma to create a mocked-up megamenu for a School site and used Maze to test how people used it to complete a set of tasks. We repeated the test for the same site using a left-hand menu and compared the results.