As part of the programme of user experience research for the latest phase of the Learn Foundations project, Learn Foundations teamed up with colleagues from Edinburgh College of Art (ECA) and the User Experience and Digital Consultancy Service to conduct usability testing. The programme of user experience research for Phase 3 of the Learn Foundations Project sought to understand how Learn […]

Staff and students were interviewed about their experiences of using Learn to support hybrid teaching and learning. The detail they provided helped build a rich picture of the hybrid environment – encompassing the practicalities and nuances of the new context.

Have you ever participated in a user engagement session designed for you to share your views, but felt that you weren’t properly included, or that your views wouldn’t be acted on?

The User Experience Service has collaborated with Student Experience Services on a three month qualitative research project exploring student experiences around health and wellbeing. We wanted to learn how we might prevent the less severe problems students experience from escalating to more complex problems and associated support. So, we focused on learning about the general […]

We have recently completed a short collaboration with the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies to better understand the needs of students of online postgraduate courses. The findings may help us understand the differing needs of students online compared to on-campus.

We recently made some changes to the staff view of MyEd, to make it easier for staff to use MyEd, and find the content that they need.  The changes include: Adding Learn to the staff home page. Making changes to the menu structure to improve how we organise content. Making it possible to favourite all […]

For practitioners of human-centred approaches to design, where face-to-face interaction is often so important to enhancing our understanding, our current requirement to maintain social distancing creates obvious barriers. However, this doesn’t mean our work to ensure we’re meeting people’s needs has to stop. In fact, there are some perhaps surprising advantages to working remotely as a user experience practitioner.

Throughout 2018/2019, the User Experience Service has been collaborating with the Learn Foundations project team to undertake a comprehensive programme of user research with students and staff. Through this we have discovered how students’ experience in Learn is closely intertwined with how staff work with it. This post summarises all our work, and outlines how we have ended up taking a service design approach.

As part of our comprehensive programme of user research in support of the Learn Foundations project, the User Experience Service has conducted contextual enquiry to better understand the contexts and needs of staff members working with Learn.

Over the summer we ran co-design events involving over 100 participants from a variety of areas of the University. This work has given us a fresh perspective on the range of web activities undertaken across the University, and is informing our next steps as we continue our project to develop the new web publishing platform and services.