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 […]

Staff and students were interviewed about their experiences of using Learn to support hybrid teaching and learning. The detail they provided helped build a rich picture of the hybrid environment – encompassing the practicalities and nuances of the new context.

Students took part in a card sorting activity as part of Learn Foundations research. This helped us understand where they looked to find information in Learn to support their learning in the hybrid context. 

Staff and students completed a top tasks survey as part of the Learn Foundations research. This helped us understand what is most important to them when they use Learn for teaching and learning in the hybrid context.