I was pleased to be invited to deliver guest lectures about the User Experience (UX) Service by academic colleagues. Presenting to students and answering their questions helped me take fresh perspectives on framing the role of UX at the University.

In my role running the UX Service, a significant part of my remit is to advocate for user-centred practices and approaches, which relies on people understanding and appreciating what the UX Service is for and what it does. Compared to other professional services disciplines, UX (in its full-form User Experience) is relatively new, therefore what we do and how we do it is not obvious. Most of the time when I speak about UX, I present to professionals working in related fields, for example content management, learning technology, web development, content design or user research.

More recently, however, I had the opportunity to speak about the UX Service to student audiences from the School of Informatics and the Business School. Preparing sessions for each of these student groups provided me with good practice coming up with different ways of explaining the purpose, operation and value of the UX Service at the University. Drawing on my previous studies in service management and design, I was also keen to bring in theory underpinning our UX practice, to give students a more rounded understanding of our service.

Sharing Learn UX work with Human Computer Interaction students

Nicole Meng from the School of Informatics invited me to join a session in November 2024 as part of the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) programme to meet students who were working their way through a piece of coursework to redesign a course in the University’s virtual learning environment, Learn, working with materials from  OpenCourseWare, powered by Drupal.

From previous research as part of the Learn Foundations project, the subsequent project to upgrade to Learn Ultra and our current work on the LOUISA project, I had an awareness of how students use Learn, and their associated perceptions and experiences of it. After consultation with Nicole, I felt it would be helpful to share insights into the non-student facing aspects of Learn – such as our learnings from research into the staff experience of Learn – to give the students a rounded picture of how the UX Service seeks to understand the user experience of Learn for both students and staff.

Drawing on the concept of service blueprinting, (a technique used to align user-facing and operator-facing interfaces by mapping out aspects of the infrastructure required to enable completion of core user tasks) I presented the idea of optimised UX in Learn as an operational state rather than an interface, to help me explain our approach.

Conceptualising UX as a service for Business School students

Tie Cui, Lecturer for the Service Management programme at the Business School approached me to ask if I would like to speak about the UX Service as an example of a service run at the University. Since re-establishing the Service in 2023, I have worked with my team to develop an operating model, consider sources of service value, and think about a working strategy, and I enjoyed speaking about these areas to the students.

I blogged about re-forming the UX Service in 2023:

Re-establishing the UX Service with the new UX team

Our operating model – following a B2B approach

Staff in the UX team work on a combination of major projects and smaller pieces of work. In major projects, members of the UX Service are embedded in project teams, we attend project meetings and plan and carry out activities like user research, testing and content design towards the project goals. For other, smaller pieces of work, our team offer guidance and materials to help colleagues set UX goals, select UX activities, and then we coach and empower others to carry out these activities themselves.

In both cases, our operating model aligns with a consultancy or Business-to-Business (B2B) approach, where we adapt our plans and techniques according to needs, requirements, timescales and available resources. In this way, we aim to foster longer-term relationships for continued working and improvement of digital systems, services and products, rather than adopting a Business-to-Customer (B2C) approach which tends to follow a more transactional, one-size-fits-all model.

Examples of our recent work are described in separate blog posts:

Working with the Careers Service on their content strategy by Nick Daniels

How we helped the School of Health in Social Science to improve their web content by Catherine Munn

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

The Role of Profiles – Our new project researching needs and potential for online profiles by Emma Horrell

UX Service – sources of service value

Value in services is an important topic on the Service Management programme, with students encouraged to understand and apply theoretical concepts like service dominant logic and value co-creation. I used the Grönroos and Voima Value Model, which shows how value comes from a partnership between provider (supplying operant resources such as specialist skills) and client (supplying operand resources such as the raw materials to be worked on). In the case of the UX Service, value can only happen in the joint sphere (in the intersection of the provider and client spheres) if clients bring digital services, products or systems to be bettered, so that the UX team can apply their specialist skills and expertise to lead a path for improvement.

Model adapted from: Grönroos, C. and Voima, P. (2013) ‘Critical service logic: Making sense of value creation and co-creation’, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 41(2), pp. 133–150.

My reflections on presenting to students

I was very thankful to Nicole and Tie for giving me the opportunity to speak about the UX Service to groups of students, because it challenged me to think of new ways to explain UX, and to describe how UX happens at the University. Both groups of students were interested to learn about the UX Service, and they asked questions about UX and University digital systems, products and services which gave me further food-for-thought. Going forward, I will look out for more opportunities to interact with our students to foster mutually beneficial shared learning.