I enjoyed taking part in the Digital Leaders Summit for 2025, organised by Boye & Co and hosted at the University of Cambridge. We achieved a lot in a single day – sharing work and ideas and discussing trends and challenges in digital leadership across multiple sectors.

In my role running the University’s UX Service, I find it incredibly helpful to knowledge-share outside of our institution, to gain valuable feedback on work-in-progress, to receive a sounding-board for emergent ideas, and to take inspiration from the perspectives and initiatives of other sectors. The annual Digital Leaders Summit organised by Janus Boye from Boye & Co brings together a diverse range of digital leaders and provides the opportunity for an intensive day of collective insight and exchange. This blog post contains a summary of the many reflections and ideas I gained from participating.

Complying with cookie requirements is an ongoing challenge

Barney Brown, Head of Digital Communications and Deputy Director and Will Kerslake, Website Experience Manager began the day reflecting on their recent experiences of ensuring University of Cambridge websites complied with ICO requirements to inform website visitors about cookies to gain their consent to set them. Barney and Will shared some of the techniques they had used to discover sites that were not compliant with cookie requirements, and also talked about their approaches to ensure site owners made the necessary changes. Their honest reflections emphasised the need for reliable website monitoring tools and reinforced the power of compliance as a driver to ensure responsible web management.

When my UX team work with website owners to improve their sites, we often encourage site owners to refer to analytics data as one way to indicate how sites are being used, and hearing from Barney and Will was a reminder that the quality of this data inherently relies on site visitors accepting cookies. The University of Edinburgh changed their approach to cookies in 2023, however, cookie compliance is still on the radar, with the existing ICO cookie-related guidelines currently under review in light of the Data (Use and Access) Act coming into law in June 2025.

Guidance on use of storage and access technologies (under review) from the ICO website

The University’s cookie consent approach is changing – blog post by Stratos Filalithis

People are drawn to Content Management Systems that are fun to use

Speaking about their distributed network of website editors, Barney and Will also gave a short demonstration of Shorthand, a publishing platform aimed at building visual digital experiences with a strong emphasis on storytelling. Like the University of Edinburgh, the University of Cambridge uses Drupal as its central publishing platform, and yet there was a tendency for content editors and creators to turn to tools like Shorthand to build scrollable stories and other digital artefacts over more traditional webpages. Although the outputs ran the risk of being less accessible than webpages, editors were drawn to use these tools over central platforms as they offered an easier-to-use interface and also emphasised aesthetic appeal in the outputs. Considering this behavioural tendency reinforced the importance of content management platforms offering a fun and enticing editorial experiences, and I resolved to check out Shorthand in more depth to learn more about its appeal.

Shorthand website

Product success is difficult to pin down for non-profits

Johanna Halfmann, a product and design leader, ran an informal workshop which encouraged us to consider the different elements that contribute to product success. We began by viewing product success as profit, however, when encouraged to share examples of user or social benefits enabling economic successes, discussions progressed in to viewing success through many different lenses. We considered whether definitions of success change over the course of product development or whether they remain constant, and the impacts of deviating from a single success definition throughout the life of a product. Having had experience of working in a product-focused way within the Drupal community, I found the conversations thought-provoking and took away many ideas to apply.

AI is a disruptor, but that’s nothing new in the world of design

Paul Jervis Heath, designer and product strategist gave an interesting talk drawing on aspects of history of innovation and design, and citing some of the disruptive forces that had shaped the course of design history. Applying the lessons of the past to the present and future, he encouraged us to consider the characteristics of AI to understand, control and direct the impact it could have. I took away three aspects about AI to think about:

• AI is a force-multiplier, meaning it will amplify whatever humans provide it with. For me this reinforced the need to ensure any data provided to AI was of excellent quality and enriched with all the necessary context, to avoid amplification of potentially harmful forces
• AI creates homogeneity, meaning it will repeat patterns and information. For me this was a reminder to have reasonable expectations of what AI can achieve, and to appreciate human minds as the best source of original ideas
• AI has emergent capacity, meaning it is changing all the time with very few guarantees or constants of how it will function. For me this was a prompt to keep learning, reading and experimenting with AI to try to keep abreast of what it can and can’t do and the latest trends.

AI transformation is everywhere – and there’s a Strategy Canvas to make AI decisions

Taking another viewpoint on AI, Stuart Munton from agency AND Digital noted the growing trend for organisations in all sectors to apply and adopt AI techniques and practices, and shared a very helpful Strategy Canvas to guide decision-making around AI application in specific contexts. The canvas used the Cynefin sense-making framework, which sets out five circumstances: clear, complicated, complex, confusing and chaotic, and suggested the application of three types of AI across those situations:

• Specific AI (supporting experiments) including tools like Cursor, Figma AI, Miro AI – to apply in complex, complicated and confusing circumstances
• Solution AI (supporting experts) including tools like Microsoft Co-pilot and Google Gemini – to apply in complicated circumstances
• Systemic AI (automating work and monitoring for variance) including AI building platforms like LangChain, Google Vertex and Microsoft Azure – to apply in clear and chaotic circumstances

Working in groups, we had the opportunity to try out the canvas applied to a defined use case. As a curious AI enthusiast, I am aware of the need to counter bias and mitigate risks when deciding to use AI and I resolved to try applying the canvas the next time I consider whether an AI solution could help solve a problem or address a challenge.

Lightening talks offered a concentrated learning and sharing experience

After lunch, the Summit programme included a series of ad-hoc lightening talks from attendees, giving us the chance to exchange pearls of wisdom and interesting nuggets of information.

I took the opportunity to present our recent work on digital sustainability

Taking advantage of a 15 minute slot, I shared our recent work blending UX with digital sustainability as a way to make content decisions at both a website and webpage level. I covered what we had learned from the work of our summer Green Digital Design intern, Zbigniew Kanabrodski, and talked about our plans for the ongoing internship, recently filled by Dono Abdurahmanova. It was a challenge to cover a lot in a short space of time, but presenting helped me to formulate my ideas and plans.

Me presenting about Digital Sustainability

I was persuaded to read Tim Berners-Lee’s new book

Simon Jones from agency Studio 24 gave an enticing overview of ‘This Is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web’, a memoir by Tim Berners-Lee. In its coverage of web history, the book includes detail on the inner workings of CERN, and delves into themes like data sovereignty, AI and the open web. Following Simon’s presentation, I was keen to read it as it seemed that many of the challenges and issues surrounding the web at its initiation are still prevalent today, and I felt a retrospective view would provide an interesting perspective.

Learn more about the book on the This Is for Everyone website

Hearing about Tiktok’s user research with video creators helped me think about researching video impact

Christina Scriven, User Experience Researcher with Bytedance (the company that owns Tiktok) talked about her work recruiting user testing participants across Europe to research trends and behavioural tendencies for creating videos. Being mindful of our work in the digital sustainability space, I found it useful to chat with Christina to prompt new research ideas and directions to help make informed considerations of responsible use of video on our webpages.