We’ve been developing a new version of the Effective Digital Content online course. This post looks at how we approached manual accessibility testing and the changes we made as a result. This is part 5 of our short series on how we built the new version of Effective Digital Content. Other posts in this series are: Part […]

Content Improvement Club is our regular meetup for web publishers. This month was the first time we ran the session at Edinburgh Futures Institute, which had a great classroom space and was centrally located for people to get to.  We looked at how to improve the usability of long pages to help users complete their […]

The recent migration from EdWeb has proven to be a monumental task that went far beyond simply moving content from one platform to another. This process, undertaken by lead publishers and technical teams, has provided a pivotal opportunity to fundamentally rethink the core objectives and strategies of the University’s online presence.  A Strategic Overhaul  For […]

At the University of Edinburgh, cookies play a vital role in enhancing our digital experience, affecting everything from website functionality to personalised advertising. However, obtaining user consent for cookies has always posed challenges, particularly with the evolving landscape of regulations and user expectations.

Carrying out usability testing early on in the design process provided useful insights about how learners would interact with our content. The feedback we received led to us making various changes to improve the user experience of the course. 

In January 2025 the Website Service team sat down and mapped out our ambitions to create a Sharepoint Hub that would be a self-service, single source of truth for web publishing with EdWeb 2.   Hub content would be:  the most up-to-date EdWeb 2 information available to users  written in accessible language  comprehensive and all in […]

As part of the Role of Profiles project, the UX team learned from the work of Safa Alsalman, who investigated using AI to produce biographical content for academic staff while working for Edinburgh Innovations.

About me  I am Christina (Xinyi) Xu, currently a final-year student majoring in Sociology and Social Anthropology. I joined the portal services team from September 2024 as a user research intern. My main responsibility is to investigate staff’s and students’ experiences using MyEd Portal – a key web portal where many staff and students would […]

The 15th of March marks Digital Clean-up Day, a day dedicated to raising awareness about digital pollution and an opportunity to audit all data, both personal and work-related. 

As a user researcher at the University, I plan and conduct research activities to help colleagues improve the content in their websites and services. Recently, I have been learning how to use Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to see what information it can provide about University websites and content.