We had a great turnout for our 4th showcase of the User Experience Service on 5 December. In this post I’ll share the slides and videos of the lightning talks, plus a flavour of the rest of the event.

Colleagues ask UX and Service colleagues about the projects they’ve collaborated on

This time round we had lightning talks on:

• UX Service update and introductions
• Student-centred MyEd
• Learn Foundations – enhancing VLE experiences for staff and students
• BI–MI tools research case study
• Document Management – understanding current practices
• Online learning experience and web enhancement

Slides

MyEd student portal – Nicola Dobiecka

MyEd is upgrading, and with it, the team wanted to overhaul how students navigate the portal. The UX Service has been working since the summer to help the team develop a new information architecture centred around the most important student tasks, and then translate this into a new navigation scheme and user interface.

Learn Foundations VLE project – Duncan Stephen

The Learn Foundations project is providing new tools and guidance to enhance the experience of staff and students using the University’s primary virtual learning environment. Our user research with staff and students is helping to inform and shape this critical initiative.

BI-MI tools – Nicola Dobiecka

Our work with the Digital Transformation BI Tools programme has continued, following on from a successful initial engagement. Our latest work with the team looked at exploring colleague’s attitudes to and perceptions of data quality. This work has helped to shape upcoming projects for the BI Service and evolve our understanding of what the University needs from new services and software.

Document management – Nicola Dobiecka

To help the Sharepoint Service team to better shape their service provision, we undertook a collaborative round of research to explore how staff in a range of roles and business areas manage documents. Our UX Consultant coached the Sharepoint team so they could actively participate in conduction of interviews and the whole sense-making process. Together we uncovered interesting patterns in staff attitudes and behaviours, and left the team with new skills they could employ independently in future.

Online Masters recruitment website development – Lauren Tormey

Over the summer we built a new web presence to support the promotion of online masters programmes at the University and piloted a collaboration with the School of History and Classics to evolve their web presence in tandem. This builds upon the user research work undertaken earlier in the year and covered in our last session.

Attendee feedback

Attendees were invited to assign dots to the most appropriate descriptors of the UX Showcase

“Hearing the UX team talking through recent examples of the great work they have been doing was a powerful demonstration of how putting the user at the forefront of what we do is absolutely key.”

Rich Dodgin
Business Analyst
Service Excellence Programme: Student Recruitment and Admissions

“From a selfish and from a service point of view the Showcase was really worthwhile. I was able to catch up with colleagues who we’ve previously been in touch with to provide some updates/share where we are etc. The opportunity to catch stakeholders in this format is a real benefit.

“It was only when I was talking people through our work that I realised how confident I feel about what we’re delivering in MyEd. Releasing new service features is typically stressful, but it’s a lot less stressful this time. That’s because so many of the design decisions we’re making are well-founded. The confidence comes from the range of ways we’ve engaged with students through the course of the project, which combine together to give a much clearer view of what they need and what they value.”

Brendan Owers
MyEd Service Manager

“Thank you for involving us. It was a worthwhile event and good to see the other work the team have been involved in.”

Claire Bradford
SharePoint Solutions Manager

Find out more

Video footage of attendees and feedback at the April 2018 UX Showcase

Join the UX Mailing list to find out about future events

Nicola Dobiecka presents a lightning talk

Colleagues have the opportunity to network and explore the projects in more detail