In most walks of life, a small number of things are significantly more important than the rest. To be effective as the manager of a web presence or service, you need to know what matters most to your target audiences. Fortunately this is fairly easy to do.

I’m introducing a new usability testing service for the University, for an initial trial period up to the end of July 2016. It will be an easy and convenient way to embed user insight into your development projects, and provide learning opportunities for anyone interested in trying the techniques out for themselves.

Digital transformation is a popular term cropping up in many organisational strategies, including our own. But what’s it all about? I attended an excellent seminar last week that prompted me to reflect on my views on the subject.

What does Richard Feynman, speaking in the early sixties know about user experience research and agile development? Quite a lot as it happens. In this little clip he hits the nail right on the head, and as web publishers in higher education it’s nice to take inspiration from world-renowned academics once in a while…

Back in September 2015, I attended a day-long workshop on Lean UX, led by author of the book, Jeff Gothelf. The day was all about how large organisations can adapt to the challenges of today’s business environment where small start up companies are significantly disrupting established business models. In this post I’ll run through the […]

I read an interesting article recently by content specialist and top tasks evangelist, Gerry McGovern. It was a commentary on a blog post recently written by a member of the UK Digital Govenrment Service (GDS) in which they outlined why they were moving away from an audience based approach to navigation and towards a single, […]

Yesterday at our monthly Web Publishers Community meeting, a gave a presentation titled “How to get a grip of your website (and then keep hold)”. It’s good do-it-yourself advice, and I also outline where the University Website Programme can step in and help. This post is a transcript of (roughly) what I said…

Last week, I spent three days on an intensive course to consolidate my knowledge on creating an effective user experience, and now hold the certificate of ‘Certified Professional in User Experience (Foundation level)’, or CPUX-F.

The new University search engine launched on 9 July after a nine month research and development period.

We’ll be introducing a few refinements to the new website design on the smallest screen sizes in the near future. This week we’ve been parallel testing three versions with staff and students around the campus.