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.

About the current version of Effective Digital Content

If you work with websites at the University, there’s a good chance that you’ve taken our course Effective Digital Content. This started life in 2006 as a classroom session called Writing for the Web, and later evolved into a fully online self-study course. The online version was initially hosted on Blackboard Learn, and moved to its new home in People and Money in 2024.

Effective Digital Content

The course covers the basics of creating accessible and purposeful digital content for the University.

It covers five topics:

• Users and devices
• Writing style
• Chunking and microcopy
• Images, accessibility and data management
• Optimisation and review

The course uses a combination of text and video to get the information across. There’s about one hour of video content, broken up into 17 parts.

Learners self-test at the end of each module using an auto-graded multiple-choice quiz. At the end of the course, there’s a final quiz that functions as a summative assessment.

The course is mandatory for anyone who needs edit access to EdWeb, the University’s centrally-provided content management system. About 380 staff completed the course in the last 12 months.

We’re continually monitoring feedback on the course. One write-up of the feedback is available here:

Effective Digital Content training – listening to our users

A new approach to teaching content design

We took a wider view of what we were trying to achieve with content design training

In 2024, we started rethinking how we offer content design training to colleagues across the University. Working with Caroline Jarrett and Jane Matthews’ consultancy Effortmark, we started by taking things back to first principles:

• What are the most common content challenges that publishers have to contend with?
• What content problems do we typically see on University websites?
• What does a publisher at the University need to know to create effective web content?

This led us towards another question:

• How can we support and encourage good practice in content design across the University?

You can read more about how we approached this in Emma Horrell’s blog post:

Making content design a habit – using behavioural science to re-think our UX training approaches

We ran content design training sessions

Part of our approach involved running live sessions to give colleagues an opportunity to learn more about content design.

These sessions were:

• Content Design for Web Publishers, a 2-hour classroom session where publishers could apply content design techniques to their own site
• Content Improvement Monthly, a 1-hour in-person meetup for publishers
• Mini Wins: Bitesize Content Improvement, a 20-minute online meetup for publishers.

We had success with practical activities and real content

In these sessions, we found that two elements tended to work well.

First, the sessions involved a learning by doing approach. Some of the in-person training was going to involve a presenter talking through a PowerPoint, but we wanted to limit how much time we spent doing that. We planned the sessions so that they would include a large practical element, giving attendees a chance to put content design into practice. This aspect of the training had good feedback, and we reflected that these parts of the sessions worked well.

Second, the sessions involved working on real content from sites that attendees work with. Publishers who attended the sessions brought along a page or section of their site that they were happy to work on with others, and we used these as examples to work on in the sessions. We found this had several benefits:

• Publishers were invested in improving real content from their own site – probably more so than if we had picked a generic example for them.
• We could discuss contextual questions around the content, such as its audience and purpose.
• Using real content highlighted that content design involves working with grey areas. It isn’t a pure science. There are often gaps in our understanding of user needs and there can be multiple valid ways to solve the same problem.

Applying this approach to our online course

We wanted to take some of these approaches and see how we might apply them to our online self-serve course.

This short series of posts is about what we’ve been trying out and what we’ve discovered in the process. Throughout the work, we’ve tried to continue using the “test and learn” approach that we often advocate for as a core part of content design.

Read more about this project

This is part one of a series about our work to develop Effective Digital Content.

In part two, Katie Spearman explains how we’ve been using usability testing during the development process.

How usability testing helped us to design our Effective Digital Content online course

Help us to test the new version of Effective Digital Content

We’re looking for staff who can meet us for a 30-minute Teams call to look though the new course and try out the activities.

If you’d be interested in helping with this, please use this form to get in touch, or you can contact Katie Spearman or Nick Daniels.

Help us to test the new version of Effective Digital Content