On 13 November, I had the pleasure of visiting my first Scottish Web Folk conference held at the University of Dundee. I didn’t go alone, and you can read about my colleagues’ perspectives here:

The Scottish Web Folk ceilidh at Dundee

The UX team reflect on Scottish Web Folk 2024

The day was packed with an excellent variety of fascinating talks from both software vendors and other institutions.

Thinking with portals

I was fascinated to hear from the University of Glasgow’s Digital Experience team about their recent revamp of their student portal. The group outlined their process from identifying an opportunity to improve the user experience, creating a business case, conducting user research, and delivering the project in an impressively short time scale. While there were a lot of moving parts, it was heartening to discover that challenges that are ubiquitous in the Higher Education sector can be mitigated with forward planning:

• Using an Agile development process can help reduce risk by continually delivering, testing, and reviewing features.
• A “phasic” funding model whereby smaller funds are allocated more regularly may help areas of an organisation that are more risk-averse.
• The strategy of establishing a quorum (a minimum set of decision-makers who are permitted to approve an action) can help mitigate bottlenecks during periods of staff absence.

The Portal Services team are always looking for opportunities to improve our portal, MyEd, and this talk was also able to provide inspiration on that topic. Crucially, keeping things simple and reducing redundant content is a great way to prevent users from becoming overwhelmed. It is vital that our institution’s inherent organisational complexity isn’t reflected in the user experience!

Later in the day, I was delighted to learn some tips and tricks from Napier University’s Scott Ferguson in his talk “Google Tag Manager: Cheat codes for the student recruitment process”. Google Analytics is a key part of identifying what content is most valuable to our users, and this relatively brief talk demonstrated that there are a myriad of techniques that may be worth considering if we want to increase our focus in this area.

Audiences

A common theme among the talks was how to communicate to different audiences.

Humans?

Nat Green and Sophie Hawkesford’s talk “Beyond the social media post: humanising your brand through tone of voice and community engagement” was a fascinating exploration of using personas in social media communications. Their hypothesis was that by adapting tone of voice, the University can promote different facets of its brand identity – such as functional, curious, or even playful – and create meaningful connections by meeting the needs of multiple audiences.

While the talk was focused on social media, I found that some of these concepts could have utility in MyEd, and that we may have even adopted some elements of these without realising it! The majority of the content on MyEd is very much towards the functional/clear/comprehensive area of the spectrum, but there may be value in adopting a more friendly or humanistic tone in student-focused areas such as our Help and support portlet.

Robots?

I was interested to learn that we don’t just have to think about writing for other humans, but that it is increasingly important to ensure that AIs can read web content. Tracey Playle from Pickle Jar provided an excellent summary of why we might want to structure our content with AI in mind, and how to go about doing so. The importance of this for me was crystallised later in the day when Tom Bianchi from Acquia informed us that, according to their research, 93% of all user journeys start with a search and that now 12% of user journeys end at that search because an AI-powered summary has satisfied the user.

In the same way that we might consider how our content might be perceived by a user, it isn’t too difficult to tailor our content to be understood by an AI. For example, when writing a style guide, it’s quite common to contrast a “good” example (indicated by a green tick) with a “bad” example (indicated by a red cross) – however, an AI might not be able to parse the indicators and so completely misunderstand the writer’s intention. We already ensure that our content is accessible to all users (including, for example, users of screen readers), so extending these principles may pay dividends in future.

Insights

Early in the day, we were treated to two presentations which heavily featured the topic of sustainability: one from my colleagues in the Website and Communications team and another from Andrew Millar from the University of Dundee. Far from being a scheduling blunder, it provided a fascinating opportunity to compare and contrast the different approaches.

Such conferences not only bridge the gap between knowledge and practice but also foster an invaluable camaraderie among peers from diverse backgrounds. Many thanks to the staff at the University of Dundee for running another successful Scottish Web Folk, and I’ll hopefully see you again next year!