This year’s UX Scotland happened 8-10 June. It was my 4th time attending, and this year I focused mainly on sessions around facilitation and management. As ever there were some real highlights for me, including a full day training session with Kim Goodwin.

Last month I had the honour of giving the opening plenary presentation at IWMW 2016, the UK Higher Education web professionals’ conference, in Liverpool. My topic was Lean UX, or as i expressed it, why requirements are hypotheses. Video and slides are now available.

This year’s UCISA conference is being held in Manchester from 16 to 18 March. I’m contributing a ‘university showcase’ in which I’ll talk through how we use collaborative usability testing as part of our development processes.

Last Saturday I contributed a session to Drupalcamp Scotland in which I talked about the challenges of, and my approach to, integrating usability testing into an agile development process.

Drupalcamp Scotland – the annual regional conference for developers and users of the Drupal CMS platform – is being hosted this year at the University of Edinburgh, with members of the University Website Programme contributing presentations on EdWeb and agile usability.

We’ve been running EdWeb showcase events this week. Demand for places has been high so we’ve arranged an extra session on Wednesday 13 May, and are looking for dates in June too.

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.

I gave a presentation at the IWMW conference last month. This is the annual event for web managers in higher education. The slides and a transcript are now available.

Martin Morrey (from the IS Applications Web Integration Team) and I are both presenting at the upcoming web managers conference – IWMW 2014. We’re running an internal session previewing our presentations on Friday 4 July for colleagues that can’t make the conference.

One of the most important aspects in embracing Drupal as the framework behind the new CMS of the University of Edinburgh, is engaging with its enthusiastic and creative community. As part of this strategy, the University sponsored Drupal Camp Scotland 2014 and contributed with two, very interesting presentations.