During March we undertook some user research with University staff and students to look at how they interact with the new website design on small screen mobile devices. I presented our findings and what we’re going to do with them at last week’s Web Publishing Community session.

We don’t advocate inline links on our University website. In fact, the current corporate content management system (CMS) Polopoly, won’t allow them. At present, the new CMS EdWeb will but this may change in future. I thought it was a good point to go over why we’ve set the policy, and clarify a few things […]

We’ll be introducing a few refinements to the new website design on the smallest screen sizes in the near future. This week we’ve been parallel testing three versions with staff and students around the campus.

For a little over 6 months now the EdWeb development team has been getting together to watch staff try out EdWeb in a regular, systematic fashion and sharing our findings via the project wiki. This post is a quick reflection on how far we’ve come.

I’m currently working with the Student Systems team to help them prepare for the development of  a new website. Together we’re taking stock of what they’re trying to achieve as a business, where the website is best placed to support this, and how their systems and communications channels work together.

At the end of last year, I ran an open invite session for web publishers, developers and project managers in which I outlined how we’re conducting rapid, iterative usability testing as part of the development of the new University CMS, EdWeb. The presentation was followed by a demo of the process in which everyone participated.

Yesterday at the Web Publishers Community, I gave a presentation in which I ran through how we manage to squeeze usability testing of the new CMS into each 3 week development burst. It was a preview of an event I’m running later in December which is now open for booking.

Sitting on the bus the other day, I picked up a copy of the free newspaper – the Metro. The outermost pages were an advert for the electrical retailer, Currys. It was a really nice ad that was essentially selling the user experience of technology. I took it back to the office to share with […]

I presented yesterday on my recent work to identify what University staff would like us to prioritise as we begin to look at enhancing the website search tool. In this post, I’ll cover how and why I did it, and what the Website Programme will be doing with what I discovered.

I ran our usability testing training course again yesterday, with another 20 members of staff leaving having seen their website or application in a totally new light. In this post, I want to consider what happens after usability testing. You’ve identified some problems; how do you see your fixes through?