Yesterday I ran a practical introductory session to some collaborative UX research and design practices for Edinburgh students, as part of our Festival of Creative Learning. It also gave colleagues an insight into how students approach their studies.

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).

The open, democratic and quick way to set an agenda known as Lean Coffee, has been working really well for us at our monthly UX meet ups. In the post I run through how it works, why we like it and why you should try it too.

Our next monthly lunchtime meet up for people interested in user experience-related matters is Wednesday 21 February, with presenter Chris Nodder providing a beginner’s guide to Design Thinking.

Our next user focused meet up happens 25 January 2018, with guest speakers Clare Barnett and Hilary Brownlie from Registers of Scotland talking about the complimentary roles of business analysts and user experience professionals.

The end of 2017 marks the first anniversary of our collaboration with IS Helpline to iteratively improve their IT help provision. A year in, we look back at some of our achievements in the process of improving the user experience around IT support at the University.

This week we welcomed Stephen Denning, Director of User Experience (UX) with Edinburgh consultants User Vision as our guest speaker at our lunchtime meet up, before a lively discussion of hot topics the group wanted to explore.

Last week I took part in my first ‘unconference’, the inaugural get together of OneTeamGov Scotland. People from across the public sector and third sector getting together to share the joys and challenges of building better services.