Understanding user needs and behaviours is a key component to the success of modern digital services. Having the appropriate data and insight at the right time, can trigger an individual or a team to take action to improve the digital experience, and thereferore support a successful organisation realise its strategic targets. With that in mind, […]

Our team has been very active, rising to the call of the University’s “Make a Difference” initiative and volunteering to support causes that are related to Edinburgh and its communities. Following from last year’s beach clean at Burntisland, Fife, we have organised a day to clean the Union Canal, and put out a call to […]

The University’s cookie consent approach has been under review and has now changed, shifting to a stricter approach against web analytics’ cookies, specifically those set by the Google Analytics platform. This change has been reflected by the introduction of a new cookie consent overlay and an updated guidance for our web publishing community. What is […]

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 […]

One of the key strategic projects our team has been working is the creation of a University Design System. What is it, why is it important and what have we been working on?

Since the introduction of the European Union (EU) cookie legislation in 2013, and after the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) implementation in 2018, the University has taken extensive measures within the central University Website (EdWeb) to reduce the risk of capturing and storing user privacy-invasive data. Additionally, platform-agnostic guidance and support has been available for […]

We have now transitioned to a full home working environment across all of our teams, responding to the UK government’s and University of Edinburgh’s guidance. Even though team members have been working from home on occasions, doing it in this scale is unprecedented. I would like to share what was involved, how we prepared and […]

Working in the open has been a long-standing part of our culture. We have supported and participated in events, used and contributed in open source technologies and resources, and recruited roles focussed in support and adoption of open platforms and practices. It is with great pleasure to see these efforts not only been sustained over […]

The central University Website is the main shop window of The University of Edinburgh. It attracts more than 13 million unique visitors per year, with nearly 40 million visits annually across the globe. It is being used by all of the University’s main audiences (prospective and existing students, academic and professional staff, alumni), for a […]

Most technology horizon reports these days seem to have a common reference: Conversational interfaces. Whether a chatbot, a voice assistant or any other machine-learning driven interface, this appears to be the next frontier in audience engagement. To reflect on this, and how these would be useful in a Higher Education environment, we ran a project […]