In March this year, I was asked to join the Drupal leadership team, to bring my UX knowledge and expertise both to Drupal’s newest product, Drupal CMS, and to Drupal core. I reflect on six months of contributing to an open-source community in a leadership position.

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 […]

For the last year, the User Experience (UX) Service has supported the LOUISA project with a programme of UX research activities aimed at understanding problems with the current experience of assessment and feedback from student and staff perspectives and identifying potential ways to improve it. Here, I consolidate the work that led to the recommendations […]

As part of a programme of user experience (UX) research activities for the LOUISA project, the UX Service worked with University staff with experience of assessment and feedback to gain their input on proposed workflows for text-based, media and group assignment submissions. These workflows had been drawn up based on findings from earlier research. 

Continuing our work to help the Careers Service make their website more user-centred, the UX Service ran a session to map the stages a PhD student typically goes through when they interact with the Careers Service, to help us work out the role of web content at different stages of the flow.

Building on the success of UX24, an in-person conference organised last year in collaboration with UCISA, we’ve now confirmed an exciting programme of speakers for a new hybrid event happening on Thursday 11 September.  Tickets are available now, free for University staff as part of our institutional UCISA membership.

The UX Service recently concluded a project to research staff requirements improve University staff profiles to meet the needs and requirements of staff. In this post, I share my reflections from running such a wide-ranging, interesting and important project for the University.

Research from the Role of Profiles project revealed what staff require from online profiles. In a series of two ideation workshops, the UX team worked with staff across the University to consider possibilities for a new profiles provision.

As the UX Service begins our next digital sustainability initiative, it was timely to pull together insights from our recent work for ideas on ways to reduce the environmental impact of digital content.

Hearing from 40 academic and professional services staff across various Schools and business units revealed why some groups of staff underused profiles compared to others and provided insights into the relative needs and preferences of different groups of staff.