I’m going to attend the annual Higher Ed web managers conference (IWMW 2015) in July, and will be contributing a 3 hour ‘masterclass’ – their term, not mine! – on how to conduct usability testing in an agile project.

The UX Scotland conference is happening in Edinburgh again next month. It’s a great opportunity on the doorstep for anyone involved in user experience design, research and management, and I’m really pleased to be attending again this year.

At this month’s session we got our first glimpse of how forms will look in EdWeb as well as hearing about the developments for viewing EdWeb on small screen devices and website search enhancements.

During March we undertook some user research with University staff and students to look at how they interact with the new website design on small screen mobile devices. I presented our findings and what we’re going to do with them at last week’s Web Publishing Community session.

We don’t advocate inline links on our University website. In fact, the current corporate content management system (CMS) Polopoly, won’t allow them. At present, the new CMS EdWeb will but this may change in future. I thought it was a good point to go over why we’ve set the policy, and clarify a few things […]

Last week, the team went to see Gavin McLachlan talk about his aims for the University, and it was great to see we’re on the same page on some key issues.

As a new member of the Editorial Assistant team here at the University Website Programme, working with EdWeb will form a rather large chunk of my day-to-day activities. Therefore, it was vital that I formed a good working relationship with it right from the very beginning.

This month, Bruce, Neil, Stratos and Duncan demoed EdWeb and delivered a project update to a full house of website editors.

I’m currently working with the Student Systems team to help them prepare for the development of  a new website. Together we’re taking stock of what they’re trying to achieve as a business, where the website is best placed to support this, and how their systems and communications channels work together.

At the end of last year, I ran an open invite session for web publishers, developers and project managers in which I outlined how we’re conducting rapid, iterative usability testing as part of the development of the new University CMS, EdWeb. The presentation was followed by a demo of the process in which everyone participated.