On 26 June 2025, members of the UX team attended a half-day unconference organised by the Prospective Student Web team. In this post, we’ve written up some reflections on the event.

This post is by Nick Daniels (Senior Content Designer), Mostafa Ebid (Digital Content Style Guide intern) and Zbigniew Kanabrodzki (Green Digital Design Intern).

What is an unconference?

An unconference is an alternative to the traditional conference format. Instead of having a set programme of presentations and workshops, the agenda is set by the people attending. Attendees pitch sessions at the start of the day and the organisers build an agenda out of that.

It’s an unusual format, but it works. The last time the UX team attended an event like this, at UKEduCamp, we enjoyed the sessions and took a lot from the day. The format lends itself more to round-table discussions than people presenting to the room, which means you get to hear what other attendees have to say about the topics being discussed.

UKEduCamp was open to anyone working within the education sector, but this time the unconference was an internal event for staff at the University of Edinburgh. Attendees came from across the University, mainly working in areas such as marketing, communications and admissions.

UKEduCamp unconference comes to Edinburgh

Nick’s reflections

I found this event really useful. There are a lot of colleagues who work on the digital side of student recruitment and it was a good chance to meet up and talk about some of the challenges in this area. Given my focus on content design, I was mainly interested in hearing about challenges related to communications, but I also liked hearing about the wider context around student recruitment and the specific problems colleagues were trying to solve.

I pitched a session on the brand and style guides that we use at the University. We’re currently reviewing the editorial style guide, and it seemed like a good opportunity to hear from people who use resources like this to improve the quality and consistency of our communications.

The style guide topic was picked up and merged with some others on related topics. In the session, we had a chance to talk about what people need from brand and style guides, and colleagues highlighted a couple of areas of interest.

First, we heard that it wasn’t ideal having both a PDF and a web version of the editorial style guide. With the two guides providing guidance to a different level of detail, it can be hard to know where to look when you have a question about university style. This matches up with our own assessment of the guide and echoes feedback from other sources.

Second, there was interest in the idea of using ELM to apply style guide rules to a text. Colleagues told us that they wanted a way to put the style guide rules into a prompt, so that ELM could then review a text and highlight possible style guide deviations within it. We’re still not in a position where we’ve found that ELM is reliably able to do this, but the interest is there. “This seems like the kind of thing a Large Language Model should be able to do” is a common comment.

Read John Wilson’s blog post about our experiments with using ELM and the style guide:

Testing ELM’s ability to return useful results with prompts about the Editorial Style Guide

Following the discussion about style guides, we talked about EdWeb 2. Publishers talked about some functionality they would like to see. These included:

• Multi-lingual support, for example providing the ability for a user to switch a page to their preferred language. There was particular interest in being able to set this on a campaign landing page.
• A native way to display 360-degree images, such as those used on pages about campus facilities.

Overall, the event was a valuable opportunity to keep in touch with colleagues in the marketing and communications community and talk about what we’re all working on. It was a good example of the “community collider” type of event that Laura Yarrow from the Government Digital Service described in her UX Scotland talk.

Three sessions I attended at UX Scotland 2025

Mostafa’s reflections

As my first unconference, the Digital Recruitment Unconference was an amazing and insightful experience. I got to meet publishers firsthand and learn about the problems they’re facing, the tools they’re using, and how they think about AI tools like ELM – and how they’re incorporating them into their work.

It was particularly insightful to learn about the processes publishers go through when creating content. For example, many are often given academic research content and asked to change it for the web. This workflow came up repeatedly, even in user interviews with publishers, and highlights how much effort goes into making web content accessible and user-friendly.

I also found it especially interesting to hear how others across the university are using ELM. In user research, some found it helpful for extracting and analysing themes and patterns. But there was a clear consensus about its limitations – most notably, its tendency to hallucinate or generate inaccurate information. We discussed ways to manage this, like designing better system prompts to guide ELM toward more structured, reliable outputs. Some in our group had already experimented with this and floated the idea of creating a shared library of high-quality prompts – maybe something like a SharePoint site for different use cases.

Publishers in our group were also using ELM, mainly to generate ideas or refine content they had already created. It was useful in helping assess whether content met audience needs and supported top tasks. Still, there was a general sense of caution as most of us felt they couldn’t fully trust ELM’s outputs. Because of this, no one used its responses directly; instead, they treated ELM more like a feedback or brainstorming tool.

Outside of my usual focus, it was fascinating to learn what others at the university are exploring. There were conversations around new media formats like 360° content and 3D visuals, and how accessibility best practices might apply to those types of assets. I hadn’t really considered things like alt text for immersive content before! We also touched on AI tools for image creation and editing, like Adobe Firefly, and discussed the benefits of these tools while also thinking about the GDPR considerations of using tools that aren’t integrated with ELM.

Zbigniew’s reflections

Given that this was a pilot unconference, it was not only the interns like me and Mostafa who have been eager to come together. In fact I was surprised by the diversity of staff with different positions and levels of hierarchy within the organisation. In my case I really wanted to learn as much as possible about the way the University goes about collecting and communicating information on employment prospects of students across multiple programmes. After all, I was working on two projects together with Careers Service and Edinburgh Innovations, organisations that deeply engage with both undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Taking a bit of initiative to pitch my own panel on the topic of student career prospects, I was grouped with quite a few people with similar interest. Over the course of a thirty-minute discussion where everyone had a voice, I learned about some less obvious caveats that influence the way things operate around the University.

Though most people complete a degree to improve their employment prospects, academic institutions are by principle organisations focused on research rather than guarantees of career. While an undergraduate or even a postgraduate in a certain field indicates commitment to a discipline, each employed graduate has their own story that can be suggestive of some steps but can rarely be replicated.

While the Covid-19 pandemic was a major recent event, even before it, employment outcomes of completing a university course could not be guaranteed. Besides this important point, the picture built together with unconference attendees made me realise how difficult it can be for university staff to build and maintain relations with graduates in order to have an up-to-date image of the job market. And this part is very important to help not only the people weighing a decision on entering a programme, but also to inform the design of resources offered to current students to support their career development.

By the end of the session, I understood more about how services within the university can support a job search at different stages – be it via interview preparation or extensive careers board. Those are however tools, rather than ready-made solutions – in the end it is up to the individual to utilise those and navigate the employment search, be it academic or private sector.

By the end of the unconference I had gained a much more informed understanding of employment search support that the University offers, which helped me to specify further questions to stakeholders of the Careers Service in later interviews.

Read more about the digital student recruitment unconference

The Prospective Student Web team have written up their reflections on the unconference here:

Reflections on our pilot digital student recruitment unconference