Web Publishers’ Community – May update
At this month’s Web Publishers’ Community session talks covered user experience; GDPR compliance in EdWeb; how to check if a Google Analytics implementation is working; and how the EdWeb cookie consent banner works.
Web Publishers’ Community May 2018 slides – EASE login required
“The new user experience service” and “Selfies, Snapchat and Student ID – a user research case study” – Neil Allison
Neil Allison opened the session by updating the group on the progress and activities of the User Experience Service since inception in 2016. Neil has already blogged the detail of this presentation (also given in greater detail to the Digital Transformation Board).
If you are interested in engaging with the service, their website details the service’s offering to the University:
- Informal advice and consultation
- Consultancy and advisory support
- Recruitment support
- Team training and guidance
- One-off or fixed-scope activities
- Active involvement through a project
User Experience (UX) service website
UX mailing list – EASE login required
What the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) means for EdWeb – Bruce Darby
The University central website recently deployed to comply with new data protection legislation. Bruce detailed changes to the form mechanism; an overlay for embeds that set external cookies; and an update to the University’s privacy notice.
University of Edinburgh privacy and cookies policy
Functional changes – EdWeb deployment update May 2018
Bruce detailed the steps EdWeb publishers should take now in order to ensure their part of the site fully complies with the change in the law. Non-EdWeb publishers may also want to take note of the changes we have made, and recommend, to ensure that their sites are in full compliance.
Privacy notice and consent GDPR compliance guidance for websites – EASE login required
Testing whether a Google Analytics implementation is working (for GDPR?) – Duncan MacGruer
I then briefly highlighted how to check whether Google Analytics has been implemented correctly on a website. We’ve recently been looking at this area to check whether our new cookie opt-out mechanisms work as designed – that is, that when our users don’t want to be tracked by analytics, they are not. I had an idea that the network tab in our browsers could achieve this, and this excellent post from Amanda Schroeder (LunaMetrics) gave me step-by-step instructions on how to do this.
Validating Google Analytics Hits with the Network Tab – LunaMetrics (external site)
I’d previously thought about the network tab following a presentation on developer tools given to the University’s Front-End Development Community last year. Katie Fenn joined us to detail how we can use these to validate and bug fix sites and applications – a topic she expanded on at WordCamp London in 2016.
Katie Fenn: Debugging your code with Chrome Dev tools – YouTube (external site)
Killing tracking cookies – allowing remarketing to comply with GDPR – Billy Wardrop
Billy rounded off our May session by showing how the University’s cookie consent banner works in relation to targeted advertising. By setting advertising cookies, the University can advertise to potential students of our courses, along with providing reminders of upcoming open days. However, with GDPR rules in mind, we wanted to allow our users to opt out of their use. Billy demonstrated a code solution to disallow these cookies when that choice was detected.
He and I then teamed up to demonstrate these working on the live site, using the Ghostery browser add-on to demonstrate that we these functions are, in fact, working. Cue a huge sigh of relief all round.
Ghostery browser add-on for tracking and cookies detection (External site)
