A question has been doing the rounds recently: do we actually need site search? It’s a fair question and one I have been giving a lot of thought to. With AI-powered summaries increasingly answering queries before users even reach a website, and with navigation that, when it works, can get people where they need to […]

Last month I was honoured to receive a national award for Outstanding Leadership from industry body UCISA, recognising my work driving positive change through UX. This achievement prompted me to reflect on my experiences leading UX in different realms over the past few years, and to think about what UX leadership means to me.

After Stratos’s blog post last week, I revisited Joshua Mitchell’s experiment asking an AI to simulate what using a screen reader actually feels like, not to replace proper testing, but to generate a transcript of the experience that could be shared with stakeholders who had never encountered one. The results were striking: skip links that […]

The Role of Profiles project produced 10 recommendations for an improved University profile provision. To start actioning these, I assembled a working group of specialists and drew on UX design principles – implementing practical prioritisation while seeking innovative solutions that addressed the research findings.

In our February session of Content Improvement Club, publishers from across the University met up and worked together on pages from their sites. In this session, we focused on five simple things that we can all do when checking over our content.

As AI-generated content becomes increasingly prevalent, questions of trust emerge, prompting a growing need for transparency about the creation of digital content. As part of an academic study, I designed and prototyped ways to display provenance data for synthetic content made by an AI searchbot on a University website.

In this post, Digital Content Style Guide Intern Hannah Watson examines the research and existing guidance that have supported our work on the University’s style guide.

When the team behind the health and wellbeing website contacted the UX Service for help improving their student-facing content ahead of the new academic year, we were happy to oblige. Adopting a coaching approach, we guided them through usability testing to identify and prioritise content changes, to make it easier for students to find out […]

Contributing to the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines, I enjoyed working with talented editors and UX professionals to shape 21 guidelines in the User Experience Design category. In this post, I spotlight selected guidelines, reflecting on how they were written, and how they encapsulate the ethos of the principles behind them.

For the past year I have been part of a UX task force developing the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines. As the guidelines reach the milestone of Draft Note status, I reflect on what they stand to achieve, and share insights from our process to make these guidelines as useful and usable as possible.