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 mega menu 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.

We wanted to test a mobile navigation concept so we built a prototype mobile menu structure using Figma and tested it with 100 people using the Maze testing platform.

When it comes to making digital products and services accessible, alt text – short for alternative text , or images as words – is a fundamental requirement. It can be tricky to get alt text right and this was a priority for the new Web Publishing Platform.

Our development team built an initial version of the editorial interface of the new Web Publishing Platform. I took the opportunity to gather some feedback from web publishers across the University and to revisit the results of our initial top tasks survey about priorities for the new platform.

Staff from universities across the UK have formed a new UX (user experience) group as part of UCISA – a member-led professional body for digital practitioners in education. Initially established in June 2021, the group became part of UCISA in September 2021.

Service Design in Government (SD in Gov) is a two-day annual conference bringing together service design experts, practitioners and enthusiasts to share their work and thinking.   In the UX and Digital Consultancy team, we have applied service design principles (in projects like Learn Foundations), and recognise its value in making the University’s digital services […]

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 […]

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 […]