It’s just over a year since we trialled our first user experience training package. We’ve run the sessions 4 times now, receiving excellent feedback from attendees and refining the provision each time to better meet staff needs.

The open, democratic and quick way to set an agenda known as Lean Coffee, has been working really well for us at our monthly UX meet ups. In the post I run through how it works, why we like it and why you should try it too.

The University Website team had the honour to be invited to the inaugural Thunder Day event, organised by the Hubert Burda publishing company in Hamburg, Germany. The main theme of the day was how open collaboration can help when delivering digital content through the web.

I’ve just delivered 3 days’ training in user experience (UX) research and design techniques to staff working in IT Services at the University of Essex. (Forgive the title pun, I couldn’t resist). In this post I’ll cover what the training entailed and how trainees rated it.

A number of staff from around the University have just been to the Drupal conference DrupalCon. I had the great experience of giving a presentation about collaborative development with Tim Gray from the IS Applications division. Shortly after our return from the conference we were able to continue the collaboration theme with our 4th EdWeb […]

Just before leaving for my summer holidays, I had the great chance to travel to Canterbury and the University of Kent, where the annual Institutional Web Managers Workshop (IWMW for short) was hosted. This was the 21st year for the conference, which underlined the success of this long-standing networking and collaboration opportunity.

Successful digital projects, effective digital products and services and great user experiences need multidisciplinary collaboration. In this post I’ll go through why I value techniques that facilitate this multidisciplinary approach so highly, and how business units across the University are calling on us to help them do the same.

We have created, and continue to explore, an open system whereby developers from all over the University can write and contribute code adding new functionality to the software that runs the University website benefiting the whole University. With our third EdWeb code sprint completed the process now feels properly established. This is part of a […]

Pair writing is a speedy way to craft content — it teams up content and subject experts to write together in a 1-2 hour session. We’ve started using this process with colleagues to improve and create University web pages.

We are embarking on a collaborative initiative with IS Helpline to improve the quality of online IT support for students. This is a great opportunity for us to demonstrate the impact of continuous review and improvement processes on the student digital experience.