I was pleased to be invited to deliver guest lectures about the User Experience (UX) Service by academic colleagues. Presenting to students and answering their questions helped me take fresh perspectives on framing the role of UX at the University.

As part of the Role of Profiles project, the UX team learned from the work of Safa Alsalman, who investigated using AI to produce biographical content for academic staff while working for Edinburgh Innovations.

I joined the annual Boye & Co end-of-winter meeting to share and discuss issues and trends in digital leadership and content management with other professionals from digital industries. I shared our work experimenting with AI in Drupal and learned about opportunities and challenges in the digital sector.

As part of the Role of Profiles research project, the UX Service circulated a survey to staff across the University to gather data about how they use online profiles and what they think of them. 262 staff responded, providing valuable insights.

Discovery research to learn about staff profile content published in EdWeb formed part of the initiation of a new six-month project aimed at improving the provision for publishing online profiles.

The UX Service has begun a new six-month project recognising the importance of online staff profile content. Our project will research current use of profiles, learn staff needs for profile content and ideate ways to optimise display of online profile content.

Agentic AI is a new area of Drupal development. Like all software developments, it can be made more useful and usable through UX research. Working with Drupal AI expert Jamie Abrahams, I conducted research with University staff to learn about the UX of AI Assistants so I could contribute to making them even better.

Following a successful pilot test, I conducted more UX research of Drupal AI Assistants with University staff. I learned what staff thought and expected from the Assistants and how they interacted with them. Working iteratively, I was able to feed back what I learned between testing rounds to drive continued user-centred improvements.

AI Assistants are an exciting new Drupal development, intended to support and empower content creators and site editors to achieve their tasks. Having designed a UX research approach to test Drupal AI Assistants with University staff, I conducted a pilot test to try out the set-up: planned scenario, tasks and identified UX success indicators.

In September 2024 Drupal unveiled AI Assistants as part of its new Drupal CMS product. Recognising the potential of this new feature to help and support University staff with web-related tasks, I collaborated with Jamie Abrahams, Drupal AI expert to learn how the Assistants worked and to design a UX research approach to test them.