We had a full house at our latest User Experience Service showcase on 23 July, with a focus on research and design conducted for business critical services: EASE authentication, Card Services, EdWeb and Learn. In this post I’ll share videos of the lightning talks and provide an overview of the session.

Collaborative sketching workshops are a quick and effective way to get design decisions moving forward as a team. In this post I go through the benefits, provide the materials needed and give a step-by-step guide so that you can run your own session.

In the previous lunchtime meetup, Mary Elder told us about the work that has been carried out to make MyEd a truly student-centred portal, and Neil Allison reported on the University’s Student Digital Experience Standards.

We are seeking to better understand your needs to inform how we can enhance web services to ensure they serve you better. These services will complement and sit alongside the current corporate CMS. 

Public sector design community colleagues have been meeting to talk about service design; what it is and why it matters. The podcast they’ve produced is relevant to our service improvement work at the University and well worth a listen.

We had a great turnout for our 4th showcase of the User Experience Service on 5 December. In this post I’ll share the slides and videos of the lightning talks, plus a flavour of the rest of the event.

Our User Experience training continues to be very popular and well reviewed by the University staff attending. At the recent sessions, I asked a few of the group what they thought and have pulled the comments together into a short video.

Our next lunchtime meetup for staff interested in user experience-related matters is Wednesday 3rd October, with Nicola Dobiecka providing an overview of user research facilitation.

How a trip to the hospital, and wait by a set of doors, prompted some thinking about interaction, context and empathy.

If you’re familiar with higher education, you’ll know that it’s a broad and varied sector. This is no more true than in a university as large, old and research-focused as Edinburgh. And supporting our university by working in user research and experience design in Information Services right now is a challenging and interesting prospect.