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.

Last week I presented an update to the Digital Transformation Board on what the User Experience (UX) Service has achieved so far and what lies ahead for the coming year.

Having developed a detailed picture of users’ needs when working with APIs, we used workshops to bring focus to the findings and prioritise next steps for the API Service.

The UX Service has been carrying out user research for the Service Management team, who are currently undertaking a programme to develop an API Service as part of the Digital Transformation Initiative.

It’s just over a year since we trialled our first user experience training package. We’ve run the sessions 4 times now, receiving excellent feedback from attendees and refining the provision each time to better meet staff needs.

Colleagues from across the University learned about the design thinking process as part of our latest monthly user focused lunchtime meetup.

We’re running another of our showcase events to highlight how the pilot User Experience (UX) Service is helping a wide range of projects get closer to their target audiences and make better decisions. Booking for Wednesday 4 April is now open.

At our last user focused meet up at the end of January, we were fortunate to have guest speakers from Registers of Scotland talking about the relationship between the disciplines of user experience (UX) and business analysis (BA).

Last week, I presented back some user research findings to the Service Management team in Information Services. The research has been looking at how people get hold of the facts and figures they need to understand what’s happening within the University.