Continuing our UX research on AI features, we worked with the EdHelp team to design and run user tests to learn how students respond to their ELM-enhanced online enquiry service, AskEdHelp. This post documents our methods, findings and recommendations. 

This is a joint blog with reflections from Katie Spearman and Mel Batcharj from the User Experience Service who attended the conference.

Last year, our Green Digital Design Intern audited the Edinburgh Innovations website for digital sustainability, and made several recommendations. This year’s internship went further – researching how users actually interacted with the site and uncovering potential to improve both the site’s UX and its environmental impact.

Building on the success of our in-person UX conference last year, I worked with UCISA to organise and run a hybrid UX Community Day. It succeeded in bringing together 185 professionals from 60 institutes for a day of peer-to peer UX knowledge exchange. I reflect on organising an impactful and enriching event.

Now in its third year, the annual Scottish Web Folk conference was organised and hosted by the brilliant Web Services team at the University of Dundee on 30 October. Nick, Katie and Emma from the UX Service enjoyed attending and delivering presentations. Here, they reflect on a day of learning and sharing.

In our October session of Content Improvement Club, we divided up into breakout rooms and worked on the same page of content. Then we came back together and compared the edits we had made. This session helped us to learn about what different editors look for when working on a piece of content.

Content Improvement Club is our regular meetup for web publishers. This month, we focused on how to make web content easier to use by applying a nine-step editing process called ‘Editing that works’.

In January, the UX team spent a day ideating on how to apply Drupal AI to University web content management and built a prototype including an AI-powered search feature. But would students find it useful and usable? Preliminary UX research revealed useful insights.

This summer, Digital Content Style Guide Intern Mostafa Ebid integrated ELM into EdWeb2 in a Generative AI tool aimed at helping web publishers prepare content. He tested it with a sample of participants to make an initial assessment of the user experience it provided in the context of assisting them with web publishing tasks.

The University holds a vast collection of digitised artefacts including images, manuscripts and artworks, accessed through a central digital collections platform. The Digital Collections team asked for UX support with a project to redesign the platform front-end, to help ensure it served needs and expectations of platform users.