I recently surveyed the University’s digital development & management communities on what was important to them. In this post I’ll share the results and a few opinions on the value of design principles.

This year’s UX Scotland happened 8-10 June. It was my 4th time attending, and this year I focused mainly on sessions around facilitation and management. As ever there were some real highlights for me, including a full day training session with Kim Goodwin.

The University had a fantastic level of representation at  this year’s IWMW conference hosted at Liverpool JMU in late June. In this post, colleagues share their thoughts on the event.

This week we bid farewell to Rachel Bhandari, who has been an essential member of our team for the past couple of years doing great work to enhance our content strategy practices and helping the Universtiy transition to EdWeb.

Last month I led a workshop session on collaborative sketching where over 60 colleagues explored potential design approaches and generated around 300 ideas in an hour.

Over the past couple of months Vanessa and I have been supporting the development of a new web app for students. The Web, Graphics & Interaction Team invited us to get involved and help them make their new service as quick and user-friendly to use as possible. The collaboration has been a great success.

Our final Usability Testing Service showcase session of the summer (30 June) focused on the prospective postgraduate experience using the Degree Finder and associated websites.

Last month I had the honour of giving the opening plenary presentation at IWMW 2016, the UK Higher Education web professionals’ conference, in Liverpool. My topic was Lean UX, or as i expressed it, why requirements are hypotheses. Video and slides are now available.

We contributed two workshops to this year’s IWMW conference, sharing our knowledge and experience with web managers from universities across the UK.

In our latest showcase of the Usability Testing Service (held 15 June), we worked with our frontline IT support colleagues to learn where their website self help pages could be better.