I read an interesting article recently by content specialist and top tasks evangelist, Gerry McGovern. It was a commentary on a blog post recently written by a member of the UK Digital Govenrment Service (GDS) in which they outlined why they were moving away from an audience based approach to navigation and towards a single, […]

In the process of redesigning the website’s search results page, I tried out rapid collaborative prototyping and found it dramatically speeded up my design development and helped to build consensus with stakeholders in the team.

For a little over 6 months now the EdWeb development team has been getting together to watch staff try out EdWeb in a regular, systematic fashion and sharing our findings via the project wiki. This post is a quick reflection on how far we’ve come.

I’m currently working with the Student Systems team to help them prepare for the development of  a new website. Together we’re taking stock of what they’re trying to achieve as a business, where the website is best placed to support this, and how their systems and communications channels work together.

At the end of last year, I ran an open invite session for web publishers, developers and project managers in which I outlined how we’re conducting rapid, iterative usability testing as part of the development of the new University CMS, EdWeb. The presentation was followed by a demo of the process in which everyone participated.

Yesterday at the Web Publishers Community, I gave a presentation in which I ran through how we manage to squeeze usability testing of the new CMS into each 3 week development burst. It was a preview of an event I’m running later in December which is now open for booking.

On 17 October, I attended the “Office 365 Collaboration Tools Event for Further and Higher Education” conference in Edinburgh, which sought to bring together experiences of these services in the further and higher education sector.

Last month a small group of colleagues from across the University attended the annual web managers conference in Newcastle. I asked everyone to answer three quick questions to give you a snapshot of what they thought of the event.