Now in its third year, the annual Scottish Web Folk conference was organised and hosted by the brilliant Web Services team at the University of Dundee on 30 October. Nick, Katie and Emma from the UX Service enjoyed attending and delivering presentations. Here, they reflect on their highlights from a brilliant day of learning and sharing.

Scottish Web Folk, as the name suggests, was originally set up to foster collaboration between people working in web-related roles and services across Scotland to enable aligned approaches to shared sectoral challenges. The first Scottish Web Folk conference was held in 2023, organised by Andrew Millar, Rob Ryder-Richardson and others from the Web Services team at the University of Dundee, and was so successful, it became an annual event. Acknowledging the financial challenges many universities are currently facing, the theme for this year’s event was ‘Stretching the Tartan: Never waste a crisis’. In the call for proposals, sessions were encouraged on the theme of doing things differently, and doing more with less. The UX team were successful in having multiple talk proposals accepted, and therefore recollect their experiences of both attending and speaking at the event.

Emma’s reflections

I have had the good fortune to have attended the Scottish Web Folk conference twice before, but this was my first time as a speaker. I really appreciated the supportive, convivial atmosphere of the conference. I left with a sense of camaraderie, having connected with old acquaintances, as well as having made new ones. I also felt a strong feeling of gratitude to be part of this community.

Andrew Millar’s ‘keeping-it-real’ approach to strategic change provided much food for thought

As our host, Andrew began the conference reflecting on the situation currently faced by the University of Dundee, reflecting on the series of events that had led to the status quo. He moved on to present insights and call-to-actions from what he called the ‘Andrew Millar Big Book of Wisdom’ which included:

• ‘Cut, cut and cut again’ – an approach that encouraged reviewing what was critical and what wasn’t when it came to delivering a service under budget
• ‘The Great Spaghetti Flinging Contest’ – prompting trying new things and testing new ideas to see what ‘sticks’
• ‘The Big Squeeze’ – a phase where governance structures could be used to define priorities within given capacity, and visibility was important.

He ended on a rallying call for us to continue to support each other with active listening and advocacy which I found to be both inspiring and powerful and I felt was an example of really admirable leadership.

I sensed enthusiasm and skepticism about applying AI to web work

The conference included many talks about AI which I personally found really useful to learn how this emerging technology is continuing to shape all aspects of higher education, from the way we create, manage and analyse website content to students’ evolving expectations of digital experiences. Marketing agency Remarkable’s talk suggested how students’ daily lives would be shaped by AI – from using an AI assistant to recap on content of missed lectures, leaning on an AI tool to brainstorm in group activities, to deploying an AI-assisted diary to schedule tutorials and peer mentor sessions. SEO specialist company Conductor shared a wealth of interesting data, including:

• Graphs to indicate the fluctuating relative proportions of university website visits from AI traffic (from AI search engines or Gen AI sources) vs those from organic traffic (from more traditional search engine results),
• Charts to show the relative rankings of different universities in response to prompts like ‘university scholarship’ in AI engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google Gemini.
• Results logs demonstrating the impact of grounding (achieved by pre-prompting the AI with specific sources) on the likelihood of given prompts achieving a relevant response in different AI engines.

Rob Ryder-Richardson’s demonstration showing how experimenting with AI had led the University of Dundee to make tweaks to their entry requirements section to ensure better results in AI engines (sometimes called AEO or GEO) affirmed my belief that investing time in understanding how Gen AI models work pays dividends in enabling the creation of web content that performs better in different kinds of search.

On the flip side, engaging in conversations with other attendees, I noted some describing ‘AI fatigue’ and cynical remarks about ‘AI saving the world’ suggesting not everyone had the same intrigue as me for applying AI in the web context.

My own AI talk was a bit experimental, but it seemed to be well-received

‘UX-led experiments with AI’ was the topic of my session. I proposed it as I felt it responded to the theme of ‘doing things differently’, and I also wanted to challenge myself to speak about the work we have been doing with Drupal AI over the past year in a presentation format. Writing a 30 minute talk about many months of work was difficult, I reworked my slide deck multiple times trying to find the right balance between setting the scene, describing what we did, and explaining what we learned and the impacts. I’d written blog posts to draw from but I was keen to show the AI tools in action, both as demonstrations and within the test scenarios, which meant a lot of video-editing and careful construction of a narrative around the clips to make sure the points I wanted to make were clear to the audience.

I have presented about AI before, and always find it tricky to know where to pitch it. Keeping it too basic and defining every AI term can make it feel like a boring lecture, yet skipping over details can run the risk of excluding people who have limited knowledge about and experience of AI. I was excited to present in-person, to enable me to ‘read the room’, and was heartened to see my room filling up with people who had chosen to attend my talk instead of others in the parallel tracks. My confusion over the time I had left meant I spoke too quickly at the beginning, but I managed to get back on track. Seeing the audience taking pictures of my slides, nodding along and asking questions both after the session and later in the conference assured me that my talk had gone down reasonably well, and I also came away with valuable feedback about how to improve it.

Katie’s reflections

This was my second year attending Scottish Web Folk. Last year we were in the depths of migration and it was a welcome opportunity to have a break for the day to hear about the projects that other universities were working on.

In my second year of attending the conference, I was on the programme to present two talks. I enjoyed the experience, although presenting two sessions back to back meant quite a quick turnaround! I found the setting really friendly and for both talks people seemed engaged and there was definitely a sense of collegiality.

Nick and I presented a talk about ‘rethinking content design training at scale’

This talk focused on the work we have done to redevelop the Effective Digital Content (EDC) course and our new approaches to providing content design training to staff over the last year or so, through our Content Improvement Clubs.

Nick and I have presented a few times about EDC in recent months, but previously the emphasis was on the design process of building the course. It was interesting to approach the talk from a different angle, to better fit the theme of the conference.

We focused on how the new EDC course and our approach to content design training is helping us (as a small team) to balance efficiency when trying to reach a wide audience of web publishers, with maintaining a human element to the learning process.

I also presented my content design work for the new Web Estate Governance SharePoint

I co-presented with Stratos a talk about ‘Taking a human approach to web governance: driving efficiencies and improving the health of our web estate’. I had been working on the presentation with Sonia from the UX team, but unfortunately she wasn’t able to make it on the day, so Stratos and I muddled through!

My section of the talk focused on the content design work that I had done to build a SharePoint site which gathered together relevant policies, guidance, advice and information relating to web governance at the University.  You can read more about this work here:

Putting content design theory into practice for the new Web Estate Governance SharePoint project – Website and Communications Blog

Overall the talk was well-received, despite being last on the schedule and hopefully attendees found it useful to hear about the work we’ve been doing in this area.

Nick’s reflections

It was great to head up to Dundee for my third time at Scottish Web Folk. It’s a unique mix of people who work on university websites, with presentations from content specialists, tech experts, and staff with a more strategic view weaving it all together. This year, I especially enjoyed presenting with Katie on our team’s work on the Effective Digital Content course.

Acquia and Remarkable made me think about new trends in search behaviour

As always, there were some interesting vendor presentations that gave a sense of where emerging technologies fit into the higher education digital landscape. The main message I took from these is that we need to adapt to a new world where users are increasingly using AI tools to find information. This isn’t a newsflash in late 2025, but it’s a trend that doesn’t seem to be going away.

Maggie Schroeder from Acquia presented examples of “the contained journey”, where users find answers to their questions an AI summary and don’t need to click through to websites. Similarly, Lizzie Oloruntola and Alex Lee from digital experience agency Remarkable presented on shifting behaviour as organic search declines, arguing that marketing campaigns now need to take into account Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO).

Following the conference, it’s been interesting to read about how Scottish universities are approaching this challenge:

How visible is St Andrews in AI conversations? (Nick Mullen, St Andrews)

Is AI changing the way prospective students apply for university? (Flo Vincent, University of Edinburgh)

Kris Purdy described the University of Glasgow’s omnichannel comms strategy

Reflections on digital experiences in higher education often draw attention to work happening in silos. One team solves a problem one way. Elsewhere in the university, another team solves the same problem in a different way. This creates inefficiencies and ultimately leads to information existing in multiple places. Users don’t know where to look, information gets duplicated, and the end result is unnecessary confusion.

Kris Purdy, Head of Digital Experience at the University of Glasgow, described how omnichannel messaging can help mitigate this problem. He described the siloed approach as being like a shopping mall – you need to know which shop to go to find the thing you need. He contrasted this with a concierge model, where you go to an information desk with your question, and someone brings the answer to you there. I thought the shopping mall / concierge model was a useful metaphor to help us think about this challenge. You can see it as a way to understand a common thread between Google search, portal applications like MyEd, and where we’re at now with the dominant AI interface design being a free text box saying “Ask anything”.

Kris went on to talk about how an omni-channel comms strategy can build more consistent messaging. He talked about how you need three layers:
1. Capability layer (operations teams)
2. Infrastructure layer (the tech)
3. Engagement channels layer (the user interface)

The user interface is the only part that the user sees. But you need all three layers to be working for the whole system to work.

Kris ended his talk by emphasising that this was a work in progress at Glasgow, so I’m looking forward to hearing about how they get on.

Looking forward to next year

It’s a massive effort putting on an event like this. I want to say thanks to Dundee for hosting and organising it and to the vendors for helping to keep it free. There was a large crowd of us travelling up from Edinburgh, and as always, it was great to attend and learn from the talks on offer.