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. 

We’ve been developing a new version of Effective Digital Content. This post looks at how this work fits into our wider approach to supporting content design across the University.

Content Improvement Club is our regular meetup for web publishers. This month, we looked at writing and improving alt text to make images accessible to all users.

I was pleased to be invited to deliver guest lectures about the User Experience (UX) Service by academic colleagues. Presenting to students and answering their questions helped me take fresh perspectives on framing the role of UX at the University.

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.

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. 

I joined the annual Boye & Co end-of-winter meeting to share and discuss issues and trends in digital leadership and content management with other professionals from digital industries. I shared our work experimenting with AI in Drupal and learned about opportunities and challenges in the digital sector.

The User Experience Service have been working with the Careers Service to improve their web content. In January, we ran a workshop to help the Careers Service to think through the foundations of their content strategy.

I used ELM (Edinburgh (access to) Language Models) to test content to see if it followed the University of Edinburgh’s style guide. It returned mixed results and I’ve highlighted my key findings below.

The UX Service has helped more colleagues to conduct usability tests on their website and prioritise web content improvements.