On 11 September 2025 Nick Daniels, Mel Batcharj and I attended the UCISA User Experience (UX) Community Day 2025 – organised by Emma Horrell and the UCISA committee. In this blog we share our reflections from the day.

A new hybrid format was adopted

The day was run in a new hybrid format where people could join remotely, or attend in person at different hubs across the UK – of which the University of Edinburgh was one.

There was a great sense of community throughout the day, despite it being a hybrid format. People were actively using the Teams chat function to share ideas and challenges from the outset. There was also time for speakers to take questions after talks, which encouraged further discussions. 

There was a variety of talks from within the university context and beyond

There was a good mix of talks, with some speakers talking from within the university context and others offering more of an external view.

You can take a look at the full schedule of the day in Emma Horrell’s blog:

Full schedule – UCISA UX Community day

UCISA members (including everyone in the University of Edinburgh) can also watch the recording from the day and view the presentation slides through the UCISA Connect portal.

Recordings and presentation slides – UCISA UX Community Day (UCISA Connect portal log in required)

We presented on how we’ve approached staff training to improve digital content

Mel, Nick and I presented on our work this year reworking the Effective Digital Content online course. The course addresses a common training need at universities, so hopefully it provided a useful case study for anyone else working on content design training. 

We were the first speakers of the day, so it was especially encouraging to see such a positive response in the Teams chat right from the start. Our talk sparked thoughtful questions and conversations. It’s reassuring to know that others are facing similar challenges, and that there’s real value in coming together to share approaches. 

The University of Oxford presented on how they redesigned their admission test system

It was interesting to hear about The University of Oxford’s redesign of the ‘Oxford Admission Test’ registration process in their talk about advocating UX design through a real project and evolving the UX practice with project teams.

Katie’s reflections

It was great to see how different members of the cross-disciplinary project team upskilled in UX design practices whilst working on the project – showing the real benefits of ‘learning by doing’. This is an approach that we as a UX team at Edinburgh try to advocate for – giving people the tools and support to implement UX principles in their work. 

Useful insights were also shared on their experience of collaborating with a third-party supplier and the power of user research results in helping to influence design choices.

Nick’s reflections

I really enjoyed this talk from Oxford. As part of a project on their admission testing system, they did usability testing on the third-party software that their applicants have to use. Oxford’s UX team passed on what they learned to the vendor, who later used it to make changes to the software.

The lesson I took from this is that testing insights are frequently of interest beyond the immediate team. This point was echoed in Neil Allison’s talk later the same day, where Neil outlined the benefits of having a large audience watching usability test recordings together.

Mel’s reflections

Oxford’s session on the redesign of their Oxford Admissions Test system was a real highlight for me. What stood out was the impact of sharing user research directly with their supplier, evidence that not only shaped the product, but also influenced the supplier’s wider practices. It was a clear example of the strength of UX research in driving change. They also shared another example from a different project, where accessibility initially wasn’t a priority for a supplier. But once the supplier observed user testing, things shifted: they went on to dedicate a team to accessibility issues, leading to meaningful improvements. It was a strong reminder of the power of involving suppliers directly with users, even if engagement levels vary. 

I also picked up that within the Oxford team working on this project, they had a designated accessibility champion, which felt like such a simple but powerful way of keeping accessibility at the centre of decision-making.

The University of Southampton presented on how they embed careers information in programme pages

When students are choosing a degree programme, one important consideration is how getting a degree in a particular subject will help them in the job market. Chloe Smith’s talk was about how the University Southampton communicates the employability of the degree programmes that are listed on their online prospectus.

Nick’s reflections

I thought this topic was an interesting example where user needs and business needs both support having this content online. That is, when this information is easy to find, it benefits both prospective students and the institution. When prospective students can easily rate the employability of a degree programme, it helps them feel more confident in their course choice. And at the same time, it enhances the reputation of the university when a programme page demonstrates that graduates are employable having completed a particular degree programme.

Chloe’s talk outlined:

• why programme pages were the right place for this information
• how her team developed the content
• how automation kept the content up to date
• what her team learned from testing prototypes with users
• how she measured the success of the changes using click tracking and search engine optimisation measures.

A lot of the content we work with is manually written and updated. For me, this case study showed the benefits of automated data-driven content, showing how this can meet the needs of prospective students while reducing the maintenance overhead of content teams.

The University of Birmingham presented on how good usability supports student experience and university strategy

Birmingham’s session was another one of interest and quite different.

Mel’s reflections

Their UX team worked end-to-end on an app project, combining a refresh to reflect the new university brand while acting on user feedback to make the product easier to use, and importantly, taking a mobile-first approach.

They also introduced the UMUX-Lite metric, which was new to me. It pairs a usability question with a usefulness question, offering a different way of gathering data on user experience. It was interesting to see how they’re embedding this into their UX work, what it revealed about user perceptions, and how it offered a different perspective on measuring outcomes.

Ben Sauer shared his ‘Always Be Creating Clarity’ (ABCC) process

To end the day, Ben shared some daily habits for strategic storytellers using his ABCC process.

Katie’s reflections

To end the day – I also really enjoyed Ben Sauer’s presentation. I was avidly taking notes as Ben went through his ABCC process on how to weave narratives through your presentations to help communicate your work and ideas to others effectively, with the most impact.  

One principle which struck a particular cord was how to create ‘strong story glue’ to ensure you have a strong narrative to hold your presentation together. This helps to take people on the journey and follow why you did the work and what you achieved, rather than a series of ‘And then we… And then we… And then we’ process-focused slides. Ben likened the latter to a waiter in a restaurant telling you the list of daily specials, but you forget the first one by the time they have got to the end! 

There were countless other takeaways for me from this talk and I’m already thinking about how I can put them into practice.

There’s real value in sharing challenges and different approaches

Overall, it was a really insightful day and we found it really useful to hear about the ways in which other universities are approaching content design and UX related projects. There’s always something to gain from hearing how people took different approaches to shared challenges. We found the day motivating and it gave us plenty to reflect on for future projects.