Linking UX with change management at the UCISA Leadership Conference 2024
In March 2024, the annual UCISA leadership conference came to Edinburgh. I pitched a talk about UX and change management which was accepted, giving me the opportunity to attend the three-day event.
UCISA is a professional body supporting digital professionals in the education sector. Since most UK universities are members, UCISA events offer a valuable chance to network with individuals in the field, to learn about other institutions’ initiatives and approaches and to identify opportunities to collaborate on shared challenges.
I have co-chaired the UCISA UX Group since 2022 and in that time, I’ve developed an understanding of what UCISA does and how it does it, and I was keen on attending this annual event to build on my knowledge and grow my connections, to feed back into the way I run the UX Group and also into my work as User Experience Manager at the University of Edinburgh.
My talk: Adopting UX principles to ease the pain of change management
One of the themes of the 2024 conference was change management, which prompted me to write a proposal based on reflections of my experiences applying user-centred approaches within change management initiatives at the University. One of my goals as User Experience Manager is to increase awareness and understanding of what UX is and what it can achieve, and I was thrilled when my proposal was accepted as this gave me the chance to address this goal by talking about UX to a wider audience who weren’t necessarily familiar with it.
Drawing on what I have learned from studying change management, my talk presented links between UX and change management and extolled the benefits of integrating UX practices when managing change. I shared insights from behavioural science and presented the audience with five UX principles to adopt when planning, initiating and implementing change. For each principle I talked through the supporting theory and provided examples to share my insights on practical application in the University context. My talk was well-attended on the day, and it was encouraging to receive questions throughout the conference from attendees working in various IT realms, showing that my talk had resonated with a non-UX audience as I had hoped.
Read more about my talk and access the recording on the conference webpage:
UCISA Leadership Conference schedule 2024 (UCISA website)
Learning from other universities’ case studies
The multi-day schedule included a mixture of plenary sessions with keynote speakers, discussion panels, presentations, interactive sessions, and institutional showcases. I found it interesting to learn from the corporate members and institutional members alike, and visiting the exhibitor hall I was fascinated to learn more about the many different vendors supporting digital in Higher Education.
Two case studies in particular stood out for me, described below.
Practical insight into product management in a university context – Anglia Ruskin University
In my role managing the UX Service and aligning UX activities to support University projects and programmes, I have learned about product management as a discipline and considered the practicalities of applying it as part of a broader user-centred design approach, particularly in the context of the web publishing platform.
Read my related blog post about our user-centred design process:
Dieter Kraftner, Chief Digital and Information Officer at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) gave a talk ‘Embedding Product Management in Higher Education and making it work’ which helped both demystify aspects of product management and also give practical insight into its application at ARU. He began with a comparison of product management compared to project management, identifying project management as synonymous with being timescale-driven, aimed at achieving delivery of new systems with a goal of achieving a stable operating environment. Comparing this to product management – characterised by continuous enhancements, a backlog of requirements and the need for an ongoing, dedicated team to keep iterating – it was clear to understand why product management was not always a good fit for institutions used to more traditional ways of working.
Hearing about ARU’s journey from 2019 onwards to set up the infrastructure required to support a successful product management implementation was very insightful. It was particularly interesting to learn about the changes made to their governance structure, funding models and budgetary approaches to enable ARU to work in a more agile way. Dieter also described how UX and UI design fitted into a typical product lifecycle and how this ensured the implementation of deliverables on their product roadmap. He finished the session with some tips and lessons learned and questions which resonated with many in the audience– for example – the need to be selective and apply product management approaches only to those digital products which needed to continually enhanced and are ‘never finished’ versus those which needed to stay stable.
Drupal in a higher education context – Stanford University case study
Having contributed to the Drupal community since 2022 I have a strong interest in all-things-Drupal. I was therefore interested to hear from Linnea Williams, Director of Communications at Stanford University, and Nick Condon, Managing Director, Squiz, about the evolution of the Stanford website to include an enterprise communications channel in their talk ‘Elevating digital experiences’. Linnea shared honest reflections of the challenges of establishing a centralised website in the higher education context, touching on the needs to explain agile ways of working to academic colleagues and the requirement to work in a budgetary environment where funding was largely driven by risk.
Commenting that ‘culture eats strategy’ she emphasised the need for change management approaches when driving digital innovation – investing effort into building relationships and getting individuals onboard without relying on top-down communication approaches. At Stanford, this had played out by Linnea’s team treating academic units as ‘clients’, and listening to their needs first, rather than forging ahead to share prototype templates for academic department websites.
It was encouraging to hear of Stanford’s commitment to doing user research for insights and their pledge to continually curate content and design thoughtfully with a drive for ‘polished and exquisite’ digital products with ‘no leeway for poor experiences’.
Read more about both of these talks and access recordings on the conference webpage:
UCISA Leadership Conference schedule 2024 (UCISA website)
AI was the topic on everyone’s mind
The use of artificial intelligence technology in the digital education space was a key theme of the conference, and the programme included several sessions which explored AI from different angles.
Dr Eleanor Drage, Senior Research Fellow, University of Cambridge, and Zoe Kleinman, BBC Technology Editor, both gave talks drawing from media coverage of AI, including stories of success and those of caution, social and political aspects and issues of bias. Against this backdrop it was interesting to consider different institutions’ AI initiatives and responses. Gavin McLachlan, Vice-Principal and Chief Information Officer and Librarian described the University of Edinburgh’s approach to ‘embracing AI’ with the inclusion of AI considerations in the digital strategy, the publication of guidance on AI use for staff and students, the formation of a short-life working group bringing together AI experts and stakeholders and the use of the existing University AI and Data Ethics Board.
Dr Crispin Bloomfield, Senior Education Architect from Microsoft Services and Claire Dugan, Cloud Business Analyst and Responsible AI Centre of Excellence Programme Manager from Microsoft UK, gave an insightful presentation (‘Delivering value with AI: Insights and lessons learnt in shaping your AI enabled digital journey’) about Microsoft’s AI approach, sharing findings from the Microsoft AI in Education study and emphasising the need for a socio-technical approach – incorporating democratisation of AI combined with a responsible AI standard and supporting principles and tools. Claire Dugan shared some of the Microsoft AI user needs surfaced from UX learnings which had informed the development of the Microsoft Responsible AI principles. These included the need for Microsoft to be transparent about AI’s role and limitations, to ensure humans stay in the loop and to mitigate misuse and overreliance on AI.
These insights resonated with the ‘practical wisdom’ concept presented in Shannon Vallor’s book ‘The AI mirror’. Vallor notes that AI has the power to shape our human characteristics, and cites the need for application of practical wisdom or ‘situational intelligence’ to ensure a mindful, balanced relationship with AI.
…practical wisdom is the virtue that allows for moral and political innovation. Because it links our reasoning from prior experience to other virtues like moral imagination, it allows us to solve moral problems we haven’t encountered before.” – Shannon Vallor, ‘The AI Mirror’ p118
Read more about Microsoft’s AI approach in:
The Microsoft Responsible AI Standard (Microsoft website)
AI in Education A Microsoft Special Report (Microsoft website)
Collaborating with other UCISA chairs, trustees and members of the leadership team
As part of running the UCISA UX Group, I regularly attend calls, meetings and events with chairs of other groups, and members of the UCISA executive such as trustees and the senior leadership team. Being relatively new to UCISA, I always find these sessions very valuable – to learn from others’ experience, knowledge and expertise both in my field and beyond, and to offer me reassurance and support in areas of my UCISA work. Furthermore, given the universal nature of UX, collaborating within UCISA in this way has helped me learn about other ways and opportunities to apply UX approaches and to advocate for UX more broadly.
The leadership conference presented a rare opportunity to meet others involved in UCISA face-to-face, and I was pleased to be able to have conversations with representatives from the UCISA Procurement group, the Enterprise Architecture Group and the Digital Sustainability Group among others. This has already resulted in meetings and identifying further opportunities to exchange knowledge and work together on shared issues, for example, Catherine Munn, our User Experience Research Specialist, presenting about our Green Digital internships at the UCISA Digital Sustainability conference in Nottingham:
Read more about Catherine’s talk on the UCISA Digital Sustainability conference webpage:
UCISA Digital Sustainability Conference 2024 (UCISA website)
