A green digital design internship hosted by the UX Service in summer 2025 prompted us to consider how digital housekeeping could support the efforts of the Careers Service team to streamline their website. In the process, the Careers Service emerged as admirable case study, promoting the benefits of combining both UX and digital sustainability for a more user-centred site with a reduced environmental impact.  

The UX Service began supporting the Careers Service at the start of 2025, following a request from the Careers Service team to help them redesign and improve their website. We responded to their request by planning a series of activities aimed at helping the team identify and prioritise the needs of their service and users,  and using this information to guide changes and improvements to their website.

Read about our previous work with the Careers Service in these related blog posts:

How we used a sketching workshop to support the Careers Service with their website redesign (by Nick Daniels)

How could the Careers Service better support PhD students? Mapping a user flow to inform content changes

Working with the Careers Service on their content strategy (by Nick Daniels)

In 2024, we used the outputs of a green digital design internship to inform changes to the UX Service website which reduced its environmental impact. Drawing on this work, applying concepts of digital housekeeping, and with the opportunity to renew our green design focus with Zbigniew Kanabrodski joining the team as our 2025 Green Digital Design intern, we adopted digital sustainability thinking to help the Careers Service team with their site redesign.

Read about our work on applying green designing the UX Service website, our consideration of digital housekeeping and the 2025 green digital design internship in these related blog posts:

Early beginnings as a Green Digital Design intern (by Zbigniew Kanabrodski) 

Digital housekeeping: Applying content management practices to improve digital sustainability

How green can we make the UX Service website? Using digital sustainability data to drive user-centred design decisions

The blog post recounts how we applied sustainable design principles to the Careers Service website redesign, what we learned in the process, what helped us along the way, and how the changes were ultimately made.

Counting carbon dioxide emissions and energy consumption offered another way to appraise webpages

The 2024 green design internship introduced us to Ecograder, a web-based tool which measures various environmentally focused parameters of webpages. The tool works by entering a URL of a page and running a report which then returns a score made up of 18 different measures. For simplicity and consistency with our approach last year, we picked two measurements to focus on:

• carbon dioxide emissions per page load (measured in grams of carbon dioxide)
• total page weight (measured in KB)

The Careers Service website contained around 700 pages, so measuring the environmental impact of each of these pages to get a total measure of the whole site was not feasible, instead we prioritised measuring:

• most-visited pages (indicated by a Looker Studio dashboard)
• pages the Careers Service were uncertain what to do with
• pages the Careers Service were considering changing or removing.

Reviewing the measurements of these pages, we were able to identify patterns at the page level and also gauge the environmental impact of several sections of the website the Careers Service team were undecided about.

Digital footprints of webpages could be mapped to recurring design patterns

Examining the carbon dioxide emissions and the page weights for the identified pages of interest revealed correlations between page designs and the size of their environmental impact, as illustrated below:

Taken individually, these measurements helped the Careers Service team question whether to keep, modify or remove specific pages within the website. Some of the weightier pages were earmarked for testing with users to assess whether the heavy elements they contained were useful to the users they were aimed at, and in the case of pages containing toolkits (which had been built using Xerte), the Careers team considered rebuilding these interactive elements using alternative technologies to see if that reduced the digital footprint.

Some sections represented sizeable proportions of the whole site

One of the goals the Careers Service had for their site redesign was to reduce duplicated content, particularly in cases where the same content existed within separate sections aimed at different audiences (for example, the same advisory content about preparing for interviews packaged separately within ‘Graduate’ and ‘Student’ sections of their site). Measuring the total carbon dioxide emissions and collective page weight of the pages in these sections helped the Careers team understand how significantly these sections contributed to the overall environmental impact of their site.

Sharing these estimated calculations with the Careers Service team helped them plan ahead, to make decisions about whether to keep these pages or to rework these sections to include the content elsewhere and signpost it more clearly with changes to their site structure. 

Viewing the morphing site as a ‘hippogriff’ helped the transition

The Careers Service had planned and implemented their site redesign over several months in a series of sprints, meaning that, at any one point in time, there were a changing number of pages and sections under construction and review.  To keep track of the state of different parts of their website, Blythe Day, the Careers Information and Engagement Manager, came up with the idea of imagining the site as a hippogriff, a mythical creature which is part horse, part eagle. The old or ‘as-is’ pages were labelled as ‘horse’ pages and the changed or ‘to-be’ pages were labelled as ‘eagle’ pages, which helped visualise the metamorphosis the site was going through.

A well-designed spreadsheet helped keep track of changes

As well as having ‘horse’ or ‘eagle’ status, there were various other pieces of metadata associated with each webpage from the Careers Service site, each of which had a role in guiding the  helping the smooth transition through the ‘hippogriff’ stage. A spreadsheet with carefully laid-out tabs and sheets was essential to log and monitor the different pieces of information for each page and the site as a whole.

Features of the spreadsheet included:

• a sitemap-based content audit sheet including:
  • page titles
  • section locations
• a tab mapping out all the sections to be included in the site main menu
• a changelog including the state and fate of each page such as:
  • change required:
    • unpublish
    • archive
    • no change
  • reason for change, including:
    • new page developed
    • no longer needed
    • duplicated content
    • hidden page
    • orphaned page
    • out of date content
    • section redeveloped
• a tracker with owners of each section and page.

Colour-coding and filtering helped ensure the spreadsheet could be used for multiple purposes, to track the progress of each stage of the site redesign and restructuring.

Working closely with the EdWeb service team smoothed the process

The spreadsheet was an essential tool to enable the Careers Service team to keep in close communication with the EdWeb service team, to ensure that the EdWeb team were fully aware of the intended changes and could therefore plan to support the Careers Service team in the best way, with minimal disruption to visitors of the site. Several courses of action helped this process, detailed below.

Advance notice of the changes helped the EdWeb team plan ahead

Choosing the ideal time to make changes to a website is tricky, with the need to balance downtime when the site is unavailable to end-users, as well as coordinating with planned maintenance and updates on the platform where the site is published. The Careers Service team wanted the site changes to occur ahead of the start of term and with help from the EdWeb service team, they were able to achieve this, fitting it in around a scheduled platform release.

Prototyping new page designs in a playground subsite facilitated change implementation

When the Careers Service team had identified pages in need of revision, they wanted to experiment with new ways of presenting the content on a page level and arranging the sections on a site level. Liaising with the EdWeb service team they were able to set up a temporary prototyping playground site which could be kept running alongside their main site. This gave the team the freedom to try things out in safe, controlled way without it impacting the functionality available to their site visitors. When they had decided on revisions, it was relatively straightforward to move these from the prototype site into the main site with the confidence that they would display as expected.

Managing redirects for changed URLs required a multi-step process

The Careers Service team shared their spreadsheet with the EdWeb service team in advance, so that the team could prepare to be on-hand to help them progress through the changes they wanted to make. In particular, the spreadsheet helped handle the process for redirects (necessary when pages changed location or were removed) to ensure that, for each page, stages such as:  adding the original alias, adding the destination URL, unpublishing, deleting and purging the deleted items occurred in the right order for all impacted pages.

The spreadsheet helped track various data points for each  page to be redirected:

• page owner
• original alias
• destination URL
• date of sign-off
• date unpublished
• date of redirect
• date of deletion
• URL of deleted page in UK Web Archive.

When pages were to be moved as part of whole sections, additional steps were required to ensure parent-and-child relationships between pages were handled appropriately.

Attributing pages to the UK Web Archive made deleting them easier

University web publishers tend to put time and effort into writing webpages and the Careers Service team were no exception. The team were hesistant to delete some pages from their site in case the content may be needed in the future, to avoid them having to reproduce it. A solution was to capture these pages in the UK Web Archive, which meant the content was removed from the site but could still be accessed in the Internet Archive (or Wayback Machine) if needed. By following the guidance provided by the EdWeb service team, the Careers Service team were able to successfully send over 200 pages to the Web Archive, using the spreadsheet to document the URLs of the captured pages.

Read guidance on web archiving in the EdWeb2 Hub SharePoint (log in required) 

View a sample archived page from the Careers Service site about the Data Driven Innovation programme

The redesigned site has 200 fewer pages

On 31 July 2025, the Careers Service site, complete with redesigned pages and restructured sections, went live. The revised site contained around 500 pages, compared to the original approximate 700. Pages that were removed included the following:

• Duplicated content about career options which had been kept in separate undergraduate and postgraduate sections (around 150 pages)
• Out-of-date content relating to past events and initiatives (around 30 pages)
• Sector-specific information which was no longer relevant (around 20 pages)

The revised site now includes:

• shorter user journeys for key audiences (such as PhD students and international students)
• a homepage with more of the core call to actions upfront (such as CV and interview advice)
• a top-level ‘Explore your options’ section (which was previously buried in other sections)
• fewer nested pages containing information at deep levels in the site.

Visit the redesigned Careers Service website

We’re planning usability tests of the newly changed Careers Service site

Good UX practice advocates for usability testing at the earliest opportunity, to ensure proposed designs meet user needs and expectations before committing to changes. In the case of the Careers Service site with hundreds of pages under review and redesign, however, it was not feasible to test before going live. Instead, the team made use of information learned from earlier UX activities (the sketching session, user journey mapping exercise and content strategy planning workshop) to make informed changes to their site upfront, with a view to testing the changed pages once published, so that they could then be adapted as necessary.

Taking this approach meant that the Careers Service were not held up in making changes to their site in the short-term, and having gone through the process of redesigning and restructuring parts of their site, they were knowledgeable and well-equipped to make future changes should the need arise from the results of future usability testing.

The Careers Service team have identified specific sections to target for testing:

• the new homepage: to find out if it supported key audiences like PhD students and international students to find the information they needed
• the ‘Graduates’ and ‘Explore your options’ sections: to find out if the content in these sections supported user needs and therefore needed to be kept
• the pages with a high environmental cost, such as those with videos and those with toolkits, to find out how users interact with them and make decisions on keeping or adapting the content accordingly.