Successful digital projects, effective digital products and services and great user experiences need multidisciplinary collaboration. In this post I’ll go through why I value techniques that facilitate this multidisciplinary approach so highly, and how business units across the University are calling on us to help them do the same.

The University provides access for staff and students to a wealth of online learning through Lynda.com. I’ve been working my way through much of the UX provision and can strongly recommend a playlist I compiled of sessions by Chris Nodder.

Last month, I presented a session at the annual UX Scotland conference. It was a great honour to appear on the same programme as people with a world-wide reputation in the field such as Jared Spool and Dana Chisnell. In this post, I’ve included my slides and a transcript of what I said.

This week we ran our first event to showcase the work of the pilot User Experience Service and associated areas like EdGEL and strategy development. At this session I wanted to try a different approach, encouraging dialogue about our work-in-progress, rather than one-way dissemination.

I’ve recently been learning about an approach to marketing and product management strategy called ‘Jobs to be done’. It seems an excellent way to bring business and user goals into alignment, and one to explore further in our thinking about product development.

Nick Daniels joined us this week on secondment from the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences for 9 months. He’s going to help us increase the level of service we offer while we commit to longer term collaborations with business units focussing on incremental improvements to their web presences.

This week I gave an update on the pilot User Experience Services to the board overseeing all areas involved in the Digital Transformation portfolio. In this post, I’m sharing the slides, plus a transcript of what I talked through.

Duncan Stephen joined our team at the end of March as an Editorial Development Officer, bringing a tremendous range of skills and experience developed over a number of years at other higher education institutions in Scotland.

I’m in the middle of reading the new book by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden: Sense and Respond. I’ve finding it pretty inspirational and yesterday at our Web Publishers Community session a short webinar on the topic prompted some interesting conversation.

I’ve been accepted as a contributor at this year’s UX Scotland conference, happening at Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh from 7 to 9 June 2017.