Earlier this year, I had the privilege of recruiting more Web Content Design Assistants to the UX Service to assist the move to EdWeb2. As we near the end of the migration project, it is timely to reflect on how this team has evolved, what they have achieved and what’s next.

In January 2024 I was delighted to receive the go-ahead to grow the UX team by appointing four more Web Content Design Assistants (WCDAs), making a team of five. The purpose of these roles was to support the migration project with a focus on checking accuracy and quality of migrated web content, completing necessary repairs and corrections and supporting the University’s web publishers.

Katie Spearman and Ellen Desmond began in March  2024 and Mel Batcharj and John Wilson started in April. They joined Anita Joseph who had been in the role in September 2023 and, together with Nick Bush (who left the University in February) had laid the groundwork to establish the roles and responsibilities for the WCDAs in the migration process.

Read more about Nick and Anita’s work in this blog post:

Web Content Design Assistants – helping us iterate our migration process

Since the five-strong WCDA team was established, they have worked together as a collaborative group, developing processes and trying new approaches to help the migration process moving forward. Their collective efforts are an example of great teamwork and demonstrate the power of persistent application of agile thinking to streamline a complex and unpredictable operational process. In the book ‘Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow’, authors Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais characterise enabling teams as teams which: increase autonomy, promote a culture of learning, communicate regularly, and collaborate proactively.

“Enabling teams are cross-functional groups that help other teams” – Team Topologies, 2019

How the Web Content Design Assistants prepared for and contributed to the migration process

As their manager, I have observed several factors that I felt contributed to the establishment of the WCDA team as a strong enabling team, to support the work of the wider stream-aligned migration team.

Upskilling in content design and accessibility

As the job title suggests, content design was to be a key focus of the WCDAs’ work. In their initial weeks, they completed a four-part content design course run for LTW by Paul Boag, a specialist in content design and user experience with years of experience in higher education. Coupled with accessibility training from the Disability Information team along with a practical session from Bruce Darby, (then University Website Development Project Manager), the WCDA team received a sound grounding in designing digital content, to apply when they began using and interacting with EdWeb.

Developing a uniform approach to auditing and reporting on migrations

A migration script was used to automate the move of content from the old EdWeb1 sites to their new EdWeb2 counterparts. The WCDA team had a role to check that the content had transferred correctly. To achieve this, they implemented a thorough auditing process, checking page-by-page and making use of ‘mtools’ – an audit tool developed by Nick Bush which presented pages in a side-by-side view.

Instances of missing content and errors needed to be logged and it was important to note these in a consistent way so they could be passed to the wider team for investigation and diagnosis. Anita Joseph developed a template for clear, concise presentation of audit results and also created accompanying guidance for the description and categorisation of information arising from the audits.

Adopting both the audit template and the guidance helped reduce the risk of misinterpretation and improved coherence across the team. Furthermore, this consistent approach made it easier to spot patterns and track recurring issues for iterative learning as the migration progressed.

Optimising opportunities to support web publishers

As sites were migrated, it was important to keep in close contact with the web publishers who owned the content, however, time was tight. The change freeze window (a period when sites are unavailable to be edited by publishers as the content is transferred) was only a few weeks in duration and publishers had many other demands on their time.

The WCDAs assigned themselves to sites and worked closely with Paula Sivinandan, the Migration Coordinator and Anita Briggs, Migration Coordination Assistant to plan for meetings with web publishers. To make best use of the time with publishers, they prepared information in advance, using audit data and other sources to create comprehensive handover notes following a consistent, templated approach, to share with publishers for review and discussion.

Aside from the meetings, the WCDAs sought other chances to work with web publishers, for example, by assisting the running of ongoing content design training sessions led by Senior Content Designer Nick Daniels. Being present at these sessions gave the WCDAs an additional chance to hear from publishers and to feedback their comments and questions to the wider migration team.

Read Katie Spearman’s account of one of our content design training sessions:

Content Improvement Monthly: top takeaways, ‘mini-wins’ and resources for managing long pages

Transferring knowledge and sharing work as the migration team scaled up

Depending on their complexity, individual websites required bespoke manual work to complete migration, to supplement the automated migration process. This work varied in complexity and included tasks like:

• replacing missing content
• fixing on-page styling
• correcting breadcrumbs
• reformatting on-page elements
• adjusting column layouts

To ensure a consistent approach to these sorts of manual fixes, step-by-step guidance and how-to documentation (and in some cases, videos) became very important. Anita Joseph pioneered this approach and the other WCDAs followed suit to build a comprehensive bank of knowledge for the team to refer to, aligning with the work of Tess Higgins from the Digital Skills team in her work leading the EdWeb2 training programme. When new colleagues joined the team in August 2024, these resources, along with other guidance relating to the auditing process previously described, proved to be very useful in the onboarding process.

What’s next for the Web Content Design Assistants?

With migrations well underway, the WCDAs remain an integral part of the migration team until migration is complete. During their time with the UX Service so far they have been instrumental in assisting with other areas of UX work, for example, the ongoing development of our content design training, supporting colleagues across the University to make their websites more audience-focused, and our work for the LOUISA project to improve the student and staff experience of in-course assessment and feedback through Learn.

Read more about this work in these related blog posts:

Helping colleagues learn and apply content design in practice at the University by Emma Horrell 

DIY user research: Helping the New Students team to optimise their web content by Catherine Munn

A UX strategy to improve the course assessment experience for staff and students by Catherine Munn