Vanessa Zervogianni has joined us as a Usability Testing Service Assistant, enabling the pilot service to support more schools and business units to make their websites and software more user friendly.

We’re currently doing some work to support the Student Experience Services Communications (SES Comms) project, and as part of this, we’ve been reviewing the Personal Tutors and Student Support Officers (PTs and SSOs) website.

Yesterday I ran a series of usability testing sessions that were observed by nearly 30 colleagues, most of whom are customers of our service. Some teams would want to do this in private, but not us! We’re happy to have our customers help us identify where we can improve. Plus, we’ve more usability sessions in […]

I’m running 4 demo sessions of the new usability testing service in the coming months. These are open to all staff to come along and see how the process works, with the first happening on Wednesday 25 May.

I was watching a presentation by Lean UX author, Jeff Gothelf, and a point he made about user-focused development – taking small steps, sensing and responding – really struck with me. So much so, I’ve written a bit of it up to share here.

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (2002) by Jakob Nielson & Marie Tahir takes a look at the websites of a variety of companies and analyses what’s good about their homepages and what can be improved. These case studies serve as a good reminder as to what you must do to have an effective homepage.

Earlier this week I was supporting our CIO, Gavin McLachlan, as he ran a session on digital transformation for managers within Information Services. The presentation and mini-workshop went down very well, prompting lots of discussion and enthusiastic collaboration. Listening to Gavin’s message prompted me to pull together some thoughts and resources on the subject.

In most walks of life, a small number of things are significantly more important than the rest. To be effective as the manager of a web presence or service, you need to know what matters most to your target audiences. Fortunately this is fairly easy to do.

We do a lot of engagement via University mailing lists, and on the whole do pretty well in terms of response and reaction. I wanted to share with you a few things I’ve learned over the years in the course of communicating with the communities we support.

I’m introducing a new usability testing service for the University, for an initial trial period up to the end of July 2016. It will be an easy and convenient way to embed user insight into your development projects, and provide learning opportunities for anyone interested in trying the techniques out for themselves.