I’ve just delivered 3 days’ training in user experience (UX) research and design techniques to staff working in IT Services at the University of Essex. (Forgive the title pun, I couldn’t resist). In this post I’ll cover what the training entailed and how trainees rated it.

Following the success of our first-ever lunchtime meet up for colleagues interested in all things user experience, we’ve set up our next one. It’s happening Wednesday 13 December.

Yesterday we held the first of hopefully many lunchtime UX meetup sessions for colleagues interested in making websites, products and services for useful and user-friendly. We started with a seminar on guerrilla user research from Marty Dunlop, before spending 45 minutes in a lively debate of topics chosen by the group.

The latest UX Showcase session held on 13 October outlined the recent activity surrounding our user experience services. This was our second such event, and it was great to see a wide range of attendees continuing to demonstrate their interest in the UX activities happening at the University.

We’re running another informal briefing and networking event centred around user experience-related services and activities happening at the moment. You can book a place for the session happening at Argyle House, Friday 13 October 14:30.

Successful digital projects, effective digital products and services and great user experiences need multidisciplinary collaboration. In this post I’ll go through why I value techniques that facilitate this multidisciplinary approach so highly, and how business units across the University are calling on us to help them do the same.

This summer we worked with IS Helpline, Student Induction and Student Systems to improve our digital provision for new students.

The University provides access for staff and students to a wealth of online learning through Lynda.com. I’ve been working my way through much of the UX provision and can strongly recommend a playlist I compiled of sessions by Chris Nodder.

Last month, I presented a session at the annual UX Scotland conference. It was a great honour to appear on the same programme as people with a world-wide reputation in the field such as Jared Spool and Dana Chisnell. In this post, I’ve included my slides and a transcript of what I said.

I had an opportunity to attend a masterclass held by Gerry McGovern, the pioneer of top tasks — a key user research tool used by our team for ten years.