If the alpha phase were a theatre staging rehearsals, screen prototypes would be the main event on the stage. They are the visible sign of what visitors would see.

The prototypes we’ve developed in the alpha were led by our user experience and interaction designers. They show how we’d make it easy for anybody reading a news article to connect with the academic experts important to the stories. We’d found huge latent demand for this in our ������Ƭy research.

Prototyping goes beyond what the website visitor sees when they get to a news article, however. It covers how they even stumble across the article in the first place.

Our Digital UX team also worked back-stage, to continue the metaphor, on prototyping ways we might organise news on the site. So that visitors come across news articles that will be helpful to them to make fruitful connections.

What we did back-stage so the right news is shown in the right places

We developed the idea of having one news index page, to try to solve the problem that most news sections are little found. We worked together, with our SEO (search engine optimisation) manager devised a format for web addresses and our UX designers developed an idea for a filter.

This way, we’d have an index that’s easily found, and when a visitor arrives they can easily call up only the articles for one department or centre.

At the same time, we were thinking about all those visitors who’d never seek out news, but who might be helped in their tasks by some categories of news. So our content designer and senior analyst also audited news content and explored data on journeys where some news might be useful. We found:

• that researchers’ looking to collaborate took journeys lacking information on opportunities and who to contact
• that there was a potentially related behaviour from over 84,000 visitors a year to click in, and out, of several staff profiles
• that some categories of news could fill the gaps in information on who could help these visitors if placed in their journeys through the site
• a taxonomy could help to place useful news content in these journeys

For example, the University announced last year was that we’d set up a new institute to work on ensuring ‘artificial intelligence for good’. Our research area, institute and staff profile pages do not make clear who to contact about the opportunity to collaborate on this. We asked ourselves: how might news content help in scenarios like this?

Designing how to showcase news in journeys across the University website

Our user experience professionals grappled with how and where we’d give research pages visitors previews of news content that might help with their tasks.

We needed to surface the value relating to their task of finding work to collaborate on. But we needed to do this without getting in the way of users searching for different things. We sketched how a ‘teaser card’ might indicate a collaboration opportunity, rather than assuming visitors will find news valuable.

We found in testing that flagging fleeting announcements in the middle of permanent content on what a department or centre offers might confuse. The teaser would need to both clearly be a news article, but also clearly show how it is related to collaboration.

In addition, giving a preview of a number of articles might be obstructive for those on mobile devices, magnifying or listening to content, as they have to spend more time scrolling through irrelevant content.

Thinking about how to help publishers to tease the right shows

This made our other back-stage work, improving the authoring experience for news publishers, all the more important. We explored whether a simple taxonomy and content management system fields could give publishers control over what is, and is not, previewed to users on department and centre pages.

As one stakeholder said: “You want these categories so that you can feed the right content to the right people.”

We need to engage stakeholders further on this in the next phase of the project. So that we do not take a billboard-plastering approach to the many news ‘productions’ publishers will be able to stage with our screen prototypes. Instead, we carefully curate news content based on what different visitor groups might engage with.

With thanks to product, analyst and user experience colleagues who I worked closely with on the show!

The first step: working out what we need to know

The Digital User Experience team was tasked with finding out how news content helps visitors and our university, and if improvements could be made. At the start of the discovery, I was tasked with supporting our excellent user researchers preparing to talk to visitors to news content.

We discussed asking these people about actions news content prompts them to take. I wondered if that was expecting too much of news content. Instead, to ensure we weren’t overlooking any impacts, I suggested asking: “Can you remember university news that made an impression on you? What did it make you think or do?”

Our user researchers thought this was a good question. I had a vote of confidence, and our team could cast our net wide as we sought out the value of news.

Content designers instinctively take a step back and question content

What is ‘news’ for you? This was a question I asked digital peers in other universities as we embarked on our quest for a rationale for news content.

While I enjoyed reviewing different approaches in our competitor review, speaking to peers was even more eye-opening. We content designers excel at searching questions. They helped me to find out whether news content’s right to valuable site space had been questioned — and how it had proved its worth.

We were learning about opportunities to add more value, as well as the problems with news content.

������Ƭy: what content success looks like for the University

One thing I know I brought to the agile discovery ‘party’ as a content designer was my experience in engaging colleagues at the University.

The best content is co-designed with stakeholders who are open-minded about how University goals are met. So helping colleagues to take a step back with me always feels valuable. They seemed to welcome a space to think about their hopes for news content in workshops.

And we were starting to get an idea of what successful news content might look like. First, however, we needed to see what success looked like from the ‘other side’ of the screen.

������Ƭy: sharing findings with university colleagues helped them imagine new possibilities

What were people searching for when they came? Where else on our site had they been? And what did they do when they arrived, and next? I loved delving into the data on search intent, behaviour, including scrolling and clicking, and users’ journeys to, and away from, news content.

I could see that stakeholders’ need for ‘news’ to help people connect with us was not always being met. Sometimes content is used in ways we never intended. Many lower value visits were quick checks of medical news by people self-diagnosing! At its best, ‘news’ is not a cul de sac, but a door.

Presenting such surprising findings to stakeholders helped us all go on a journey together. A discovery is our collective opportunity to completely re-think content to make it more valuable. The culmination was a 3-day workshop to bring everything we found out together.

By the final workshop, I was in my environment

I was the only content designer for the majority of the synthesis workshop. The content design project lead had shown me, again and again, how we add value.

She had gained a deep understanding of existing processes and emerging strategy, and also the possibilities different technologies offer to help improve these. For the final workshop, she would not be there to ask any questions or connect any dots. I had not needed to worry.

By this point, the little voice asking myself why I was in the meeting, and not busily making some source information accessible, had largely gone.

I felt comfortable asking a performance colleague why we were reporting a percentage when the total numbers were so small. I was at ease asking user researchers to tell me more about an interviewee using news to “look for inspiration”.

More than asking questions however, I made a contribution to designing solutions.

Finally, thinking about solutions for the website

In the final discovery workshop I was excited to get stuck into designing possible solutions based on the evidence before us. As content designers, this is what we do.

This time, however, I was helping to design a new process for publishing news content. I was quick, as ever, to take us a step back to an earlier stage than initially sketched. “Where do the ideas for news come from?”

I was also critiquing, when it was after time to go home, interaction designs for ‘news’. I was unsure there was evidence for signposting ‘latest news’, given content designers elsewhere signposted the most important ‘news’ content by other criteria.

After all, deciding what is important for the University and visitors to our site is our job, and one that I relish.

This would mean being upfront about where access issues existed and how users could access content. In short, it would be far more than something to comply with the law. It would be a practical guide and a useful insight into our work, to build trust in our site.

Being clear about what access issues users will encounter

Ideally our accessibility statement, like all our site content, would help people to do what they’re trying to do.

So, if somebody uses assistive tech or software, or changes settings but still struggles to access our content, they need to know there is an issue. Or if somebody wants to check if they can use a section of the site before they make the effort, they can find out at a glance.

Our old statement told them that ‘on some pages’ you cannot change the line height and ‘some tables’ cannot be tabbed through, for instance. If users only have vague information on what to expect on your pages, they may not wish to try their luck visiting them.

To fix this, I worked closely with content design, UX design and developer colleagues to work out where the biggest outstanding issues for those moving through the site were.

Experiencing issues to describe what users themselves face

������Ƭing the issues our users face led me into the thicket of impenetrable terminology that’s often used to talk about accessibility.

In the list of accessibility issues, I encountered reams of obscure language. The ‘functionality’ of a ‘hamburger menu’ button ‘is not conveyed’. ‘Radio buttons’ in the ‘filter section’ are not ‘programmatically exposed’.

I asked colleagues to show me some issues and I tried them out myself where I could. I was then able to turn the consultants’ technical language into content that was more task-orientated and relevant for users.

Take the consultants’ “no indication of current focus for keyboard-only users” on “list items inside the hamburger menu (observed when the browser is zoomed to 200%)”. This became “if you use a tab key, it may not be clear which menu item you can select”.

Helping users find what they need, without making them think

Deciding how to structure the content was not easy. We’d put issues in accessibility guideline ‘priority level’ order, which would not mean anything to most people.

An alternative I talked about with experienced content designer colleagues was to group the content for different types of users. With this design, visual impairments would be under one heading, keyboard users under another, and so on. We discussed how useful these categories would be.

There are different types of visual impairment, so do we try to break them down into ever-smaller categories? And if you need to both magnify content and use the tab key, which section on the page do you go to?

This is why I designed the statement to focus on tasks people are trying to carry out, such as ‘accessing our study pages’ or ‘using our navigation menu’. We could still put the biggest issues with access higher up.

People have in their mind what they are trying to do. Our job is to help them to do it, not get them to think about who they are.

Working in the open so we can be held to account and build trust

Making the statement useful (concrete and about what users need to know) and usable (easy to navigate and scan through) would help us to build trust.

Being clear about what users can expect next would help even more.

What are we working on next? What do we hope to fix soon? I asked colleagues these questions for the user. So that we could let them know what might have changed if they return to carry out other tasks important to them.

You can look at the accessibility statement and .

His book is about the:

• power of design to influence
• lack of designers’ involvement within the design process
• absence of ethical considerations within the design process of products and services

It’s essential reading for any designer (or indeed non-designer), and it inspired me to write about a topic that has been on my mind for some time: emotional connection with users, and the point at which creatives stop being cool.

I’m going to keep this blog post specific – it’s a thought piece with some tips and hints on how to avoid commonly held misconceptions, with some practical advice and guidance when it comes to designing experiences.

Make it pretty (and make it work)

In the digital user experience team we are committed to representing the voice of our users through the design of services that meet their needs. Having just been through a big digital transformation programme, we’ve learned how to take a user-centred design approach to our work, because we recognise that by solving users’ problems, we will also be able to meet business objectives.

Many organisations say they value the importance of good design and ‘putting our customers at the heart of all we do’, while their services and systems fail to back up that corporate promise.

On reflection, there is a good reason for this. Generally speaking, digital functions grew out of physical functions such as Marketing, Communications and IT. These were traditionally the ‘go-to’ areas that were commissioned by stakeholders to create stand-alone platforms, creative campaigns and innovative solutions. As a result, so many companies still focus on stand-alone innovations before people. There seems to be a shared mythology that pleasing aesthetics are all that is needed to capture attention, elicit engagement, and smoothly convert another happy customer. But the more difficult question, with more up-front effort, is does it DO what it’s SUPPOSED TO DO in the first place.

Caption: ‘Pretty Vacant’ sign, courtesy of ��

You don’t go to the cinema to listen to the radio

We want people who visit us in an online or offline environment to have a seamless, frictionless experience, with very direct outcomes.

We want them, for example, to:

• feel connected with us
• remember us, even if just for a quick moment
• become our advocate
• tell their friends and family about the outstanding work we do
• carry our message in a crowded and noisy world

So that…

• they buy our goods and use our services,
• we can reduce our support cost and burden
• deliver against strategic outcomes… you get the idea!

We hope that in the longer term, it might even translate into a stronger brand advocacy, loyalty and eventually increased revenues. The ultimate utopia: users’ needs meeting business’ needs.

But emotional connection is about more than just pretty pictures and impressive-sounding vocabulary – it is about meaningful content that helps people achieve something they set out to do. In this scenario, a user walks away from their interaction with us feeling satisfied, and with an innate sense of the great care we took to meet their needs as easily and clearly as possible – now �ٳ�����’s a recipe for brand loyalty.

The way we choose to share this content matters, and certain mediums (or channels) are better than others to get that impact. I’ll be the first to admit that a web page on its own is hardly ever enough.

We need to choose the right tools, or channels, for the right job. Just like we can’t expect people who go to the cinema to listen to the radio: select the best tool available for the task.

Let me explain.

Art vs Design

The basic is to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan.

as something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings.

, she talks about the similarities in the two concepts but also how they are different in their own ways. She says that design is a deliberate practice with intentions to create with a specific purpose and plan. Art is an expression of the artist for decoration, and meant to be interpreted in any number of ways.

Good art is always interpreted, leaving the observer to find the missing pieces dropped on purpose. Whereas, good design should never be open to interpretation; it should be easily understood. In fact, good design when done well is invisible to the user ().

My reflection of that is that in many organisations, ‘design’ is often mistakenly interpreted as indulgent frosting on a functional interface. The problem with this view is that if design and users’ needs are not considered from the start, it’s extremely hard and costly to do something about it later on.

There’s a good reason why many corporate portals or systems don’t function to meet requirements. They have not been designed from end-to-end with both a carefully considered user and outcome in mind. Factoring into your business case two weeks of UX design before the end of a project may meet the requirement of ‘doing some design’, but in reality won’t make the user experience any better!

You cannot fix a cake once it’s been baked. wise words – not mine. Mike says critique should be embraced at every stage of the design process, by the very people who’ll be using your service. That’s how you increase a project’s chances of success. Get feedback early and often to decrease the overall costs of maintenance, repairs and doing big projects time and time again!

The extent to which aesthetics matter

Aesthetics do matter. It is a simple fact that good-looking products and user interfaces are perceived as more valuable and having more positive qualities, even if it’s not true! This is referred to as . Users tend to perceive that things which look better, will work better, even if they are not actually more effective or efficient.

Really good design takes this into account. It makes sure that content is presented to users in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, both as a first impression and also consistently at all stages in the user journey. This elicits a sense of trust in users, and rewards that trust by maintaining it throughout their experience.

But…

Undirected or non-intentional aesthetic design carries its own risks. If this attempt at emotional engagement compromises basic functionality, reliability or usability of an interface, the positive experience you want to promote will mutate into a rant-inducing disaster for our users.

There is no point in presenting an attractive interface that doesn’t help users do what they came to do… or worse, gets in their way.

Caption: Jacques Carelman’s “impossible teapot”. Image credit:

Real examples include social media posts without punctuation, which puts an added burden on people who use screen readers. Or the use of hashtags that don’t use capital letters to help distinguish words. Or the failure to add alt-text to images. Other examples from physical settings, are special signages in buildings or at events that are meant to help clarify how something works or is accessed. Without these signs, a user is left guessing, creating needless frustration.

It shows how design serves as the communication between object and user. We call this the “”: where design elements give you the wrong usability signals to the point that special signage is needed to clarify how they work.

Caption: Your sign says ‘push’ but your handles suggest otherwise. Image credit:

Examples and tips

Tip 1: how do we know what to design?

The answer is – always -your users know. The solution is firmly held by the people we’re designing the product or experience for. This is why we need to understand them better so we know what they need as well as what is aesthetically pleasing for them.

Caption: a OneWeb end of programme sticker: ‘The answer is always: the user knows.’

Your answer is also to start viewing ‘design’ as a series of structured, systematic, intentional decisions. Some of these may not look much like “design” as it is traditionally (and mistakenly) understood (i.e. visual styling). It could be in the form of processes, or structured data, which are some of the layers we have to consider when we design services or interfaces.

For example, text messages from an organisation may not be designed as an official communication channel, therefore causing confusion and preventing users from taking an action resulting in not meeting users and business outcomes. Or say we want to add entry requirements, or related news in multiple areas within a website, rather than creating content multiple times across multiple pages, we can instead structure and manage it in one place, whether we’re publishing it for the first time or the thousandth.

Tip 2: keep things simple

The functionality of products, platforms, and websites must not be undermined. Without it, we are designing our products in the name of art and without a purpose.

Even basics like the photography brief for some new imagery, should always come back to the same principle of fulfilling an intentional purpose: meeting our users’ needs in their own context:

• can I discern the image?
• can I see myself in these spaces?
• are the images authentic?
• am I inspired by your work?

Fundamentally, this is an essential part of creating accessible images and therefore services. You should test what problems these images are there to solve. Your work should be going in front of users, your actual customers, to increase your chances of success and as already mentioned, de-risk issues when you eventually go live.

Caption: K.I.S.S. Keep It Stupid Simple. Simplicity is a lot harder than complex, image credit:

Tip 3: persuasion does not happen at pixel level

As beautifully articulated by Mike Monterio, “a pixel is just a point of proof in the execution”. If we want to design the right way, we are going to have to do it by talking to people. Because designers get hired to solve business problems.

Design isn’t marketing. Both are important but different. Marketing is about persuading users that something is a good idea. Design is about making it self-evident. A product’s usability is often cheaper and easier to address than its persuasiveness, but in order to achieve this with good design, we should not just be feeding in at the beginning or the end of work – good design happens from the start and throughout.

Answering the question of what users want to achieve is done through user research. That is not the same as more traditional market research that has been carried out for years. User research focuses on understanding user needs and how to address them, rather than how to convince them to buy. The emphasis is on observing their behaviour, rather than canvassing their opinion.

As an example, we got insights from user research for some of our study products, which are around building emotional connection. It was all about:

• being able to see the university’s places and spaces, the people (staff and students)
• hearing students tell their stories about their experiences in their own words – all about getting a true insight into their possible future
• being able to feel that this is a good choice for them

This then informed our content strategy in the selection of which content to show. In many cases this is content that hasn’t previously been published, or not published in a way that will meet these needs.��A survey or focus group could have possibly suggested some of these insights, but they wouldn’t have allowed us to find, try out and validate the best ways to execute our design solutions.

Tip 4: solving the problem can’t happen until you understand the problem

That generally means talking to people who are experiencing the problem – not your colleagues, or your friend, or your next door neighbour – unless of course they are among the people who will be marginalised as a result of your product design.

There also had to be a socio-economic lens to the design decision making, similar to those in an article by . Basically any organisation has to consider the impact of change on users, especially the ones who could be excluded by any bad decisions.

Tip 5: not understanding the scope of your work is a problem

Generally speaking, organisations are not very good at articulating business outcomes, and this makes it much harder to understand the scope of the problem you are trying to solve.

Example: “we need more revenue” is not a problem, it is an observation. Because it is not a problem, it also doesn’t have an actual solution, and if you attempt to seek one, you’ll find yourself bogged down in endless speculation that produces few results.

“Our customers drop off during the onboarding experience, which lowers our conversion rate and is leading to lost revenue” is a problem. It is specific, informed and, perhaps most importantly: actionable. Armed with this, a digital user experience can begin the investigation that will eventually lead to a meaningful answer.

A big part of what design is about is to give us a problem to solve with some measurable outcomes that explain what metrics you are looking to move.

Tip 6: not doing research to understand the problem is a problem

Back to the cake metaphor, it’s always a good idea to make sure that the cake is baked with the right ingredients for the right person. And it’s always a good idea to have a good peek behind the curtains to get your assumptions tested. I am forever grateful for challengers who kicked the tyres during usability testing or prototyping. I’d much rather it happened at that point in time, before the team released something that people cannot use. The real value of user research comes from increasing our understanding of who our users are. With every study, every interview, every interaction, our team gets to know our users a little bit better, including the context in which the users work. Then design, test and iterate!

Gathering the right feedback to understand what will drive the connection with users is a gift. “I like it”, or “this looks good ” is not good feedback because it only gives us part of the picture. It doesn’t tell us if someone can use a service, or what frictions they encounter, and does it do what they need it to do. Data and metrics can’t fully answer these questions and they can’t steer you towards the best solutions. This is why we use both qualitative and quantitative research techniques. Data tells you what is happening, qualitative research tells you why and helps you figure out how to solve problems. We talk to people, we get under the surface of what is happening. Good feedback is done through observations in order to identify how to improve a service or a product. Start by outweighing the evidence. Learn what works, learn what doesn’t work ().

Frustration costs

When something is not designed it becomes messy. Not joined up. Annoying. Not user-centric. You make your users work extra hard. In a digital world, extra unnecessary work translates to users going elsewhere to get their needs met.

was developed by the in 2001 as a communicative model for illustrating the variation in companies’ use of design. It suggests that when an organisation adopts design as part of its business strategy, �ٳ�����’s a positive link with higher revenue.

Caption: Design Ladder lists four levels of design.

We’re seeing many companies that understand this link. But the truth is large organisations are orientated around themselves, not the end-user.

As a design team, we’re in a position to help users make decisions, but also for our university. (Jared Spool). It creates frustrations, generates calls, and increases development costs through rework and waste. It also damages the environment (, Gerry McGovern).

We’re therefore in a unique position to research and test where poor design costs our organisation money.

In addition, try to ‘flip’ the perspective and see the choices you want to present from the outside. Avoid flooding with options, but bear in mind the balance between users’ time and comfort zones for handling options for a digital product. Guiding them to select between clear options that will get them somewhere quickly will take the work out of the user experience and reward the user and organisations alike.

Using common design tools and patterns, colour, line, contrast, help people consume information and make decisions more easily. “This is specifically the case for designing forms, or when you convince someone to take an action – the way typeface, colour and layout fit together says a lot about a brand and shapes new users’ perceptions.” (Aaron Walter, ).

Conclusion

Bear in mind that the aesthetic-usability effect has its limits. A pretty design can make users more forgiving of minor usability problems, but not of larger ones.

At the end of the day if:

• the user can’t find the product, the user can’t buy the product.
• the service has multiple interactions that aren’t consistent visually or that haven’t been designed for access, you end up failing those people you were meant to serve in the first place.

Even great-looking sites will have no revenue if they suffer from poor findability. The emotional connection is therefore derived from being able to complete the task efficiently.

From a pragmatic point of view, we need to master the right balance between the design, functionalities, and user experience, planning, thinking ahead, doing deep analysis and being careful and considered in constructing something that will be solid, reusable and stable. Form and function should work together. When interfaces suffer from severe usability issues, or when usability is sacrificed for aesthetics, users tend to lose patience. On the web, people are very quick to leave.

Final notes

There are many important points raised in this article. Many of them are underpinned by good standards and assurance check-points.

If you want to hear more about it, we will be hosting an Ask Me Anything session, and we will be happy to answer your questions then. To find out more first, .

Huge thanks go to Mark, Kate, Jonny and Claire for helping make this blog post better.

Links to articles and further resources:

• (Ayesha Ambreen)
• (NN Group)
• (Don Norman)
• , (Jared Spool)
• (Jared Spool)
• (Mike Monteiro)
• (Danish Design Council, issuu document)
• (Aaron Walter)
• (Smashing Magazine)
• (Jesse Russell Morgan, UX Collective)
• (Ben Holliday)
• (Gerry McGovern)
• (Gareth Ford Williams)

As someone who has always worked in digital roles, I thought for a long time that moving everything online would make me happy. But fresh insights bring fresh perspectives, and I’ve become more cautious about the ways in which we use digital tools to tackle real world challenges.

has brought a new sense of urgency to many digital practitioners, including myself, over the past decade. If this topic is new to you, then in essence the Internet – everything from data centres, to telecoms networks and end-user devices like phones and laptops – uses a lot of electricity. In fact, if you add it all together, the internet uses roughly the same amount of electricity as the entire United Kingdom, one of the world’s largest economies (Tom Greenwood, ).

In this blog post, I acknowledge what we are doing as a digital user experience team, some of our ongoing challenges as part of the OneWeb programme, and also what other steps we need to take, collectively and individually, to tackle this issue.

#1. Simple, small and effective content has a lower environmental burden

Simple, small and effective content is good for the environment and also better for your users, and you!

Design and content have a big impact on energy efficiency. From search engine optimisation (SEO), content design, and use of images, videos, fonts, to code and design choices. Running a popular digital service always has a cost associated with it, but we don’t tend to factor in the cost to the environment. The assumption is often that digital means green, but this is far from the truth.

In the words of Gerry McGovern, author of :
“Our ability to create stuff using digital tools far outstrips our ability (or willingness) to organize and manage what we have created. Dealing with the consequences of easy production and poor content management is a growing challenge”. –

To illustrate Gerry’s point I’ve included a snapshot from our 2018 content audit where we estimated our digital web estate to contain roughly 4 million web pages. Only 156,000 of these have been accessed in the last 3 years and just 8,000 pages account for 90% of all traffic to our digital estate.

Caption: representation of access to our web content, 2018

COVID-19 may have reduced traffic emissions, but it exacted a toll elsewhere for this saving. Like many other academic institutions this past year, education had to be delivered online. The University’s daily contribution to global carbon emissions as a result of online lectures and staff meetings is likely equal to that of someone flying from London to New York¹. Given this additional burden, there is even more reason to consider how we make content that is designed to last, and how we focus on completing meaningful tasks rather than ‘vanity projects’ that needlessly consume time, energy and budgets…

Now – Southampton is not unique in this matter. This is a consistent problem for almost every large, complex organisation.

There are many reasons why an organisation’s digital estate becomes unnecessarily bloated and so much content goes unvisited. It might be that:

• the content and underlying service are not designed to meet user needs
• the content is inaccessible to a large number of users because of poor positioning or broader accessibility and user experience (UX) issues
• constantly seeking the next new thing which makes it harder to argue for review and maintenance ahead of creation… a challenge we’ve already discussed in this blog post about digital governance

¹��dzܲ������ if 20 people join a Microsoft Teams video call for 1 hour, all with their webcams broadcasting Standard Definition video. This doubles if everyone broadcasts HD video.��If the University delivers 50 online lectures or virtual staff meetings like this every day, between 225GB and 550GB of data will be sent across the internet.��It is estimated that . So, 225GB of data generates 675KG of carbon.��A London to New York flight generates roughly .

#2. Whack-a-mole with platforms and systems

I’ve never said that OneWeb is the silver bullet to all our organisational problems. However, thanks to the boldness of our University in trying to deal with it, it is a step towards a better standing point, which includes the reduction in size and therefore cost of maintaining our web estate. We didn’t necessarily plan around adding to the green credentials of the University, but this will be one of the longer term outcomes of the programme as we pare back and simplify to only what’s needed to meet user needs and help them complete tasks.

We’re working as fast as we can, trying to address all the legacy issues around content creation and maintenance, which are only the tip of the iceberg. As we’re working our way through, however, we’re reducing and figuring out some of the answers to long-term maintenance and support, as more and more platforms and systems crop up all over the place.

Caption: Whack-a-mole with systems and platforms, image credit:

I do appreciate that some of these appear for very good reasons, for example, in response to urgent policies and compliance requirements. However, the lack of forward thinking and the burden this creates for users, as well as the impact to our planet, go against our best interests as a society, organisation and individuals with sustainability targets in mind. Platforms that do not meet people’s expectations undermine the credibility of the service and of the University.

And this is a good place to segue to the other side of digital sustainability ethos: fairer, more equitable design.

#3. JEDI is not just a force for good in galaxies far, far away

The Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (JEDI) framework supports creating digital products and services that are fair and open to all.

As mentioned at the start, it is important not only to promote these principles, but to fold them into the very fabric of our projects. A project ethos with JEDI at its core is less likely to alienate the people working on it as well as its potential audience (whether intended or unintended).

So, how do we incorporate these principles into our own design practice?

Equality and justice in digital design is a question of opening up opportunities for users by making our information and processes more transparent, and more available. Right now, we are employing design thinking around PhD level, where currently the information needed is scattered to the winds, the application process is opaque and specific opportunities are hidden. We’re bringing everything a potential candidate would need together and creating intuitive user journeys, while also adding guidance so that anyone from any background can easily gain an understanding of information they need.

Plain English layer

Embedding Plain English and accessibility principles in all our digital content is an exercise in inclusivity. We specifically aim not to exclude anyone, whether they:

• don’t have English as a first language
• have a disability
• are looking at our content while multi-tasking, for example looking after family
• are simply not initiated in the subject area yet

Our users are diverse people with diverse needs that change from journey to journey. We should design our services to reflect this.

There are obvious social equality issues that factor into our users’ backgrounds and circumstances. One way we aim to improve things is by applying a ‘plain English layer’ to things like research projects, which we expect will also help with discoverability through search.

Diverse communities

Our aim for the new subject areas pages (currently in prototyping stage) is to create a strong sense of place. We are assisting potential students in their desire to imagine themselves ‘there’. ‘There’ means physical spaces like facilities but it also means community – people. We need to reflect the diverse community and culture at Southampton, as we know that’s really important to all our users.

Part of Inclusive Design Toolkit (developed for ) reveals that we should be thinking about variations in access and inclusion when we think about user personas. It is a good reminder of situational inclusion. We think �ٳ�����’s another layer (socio-economic) that would lead to some people having greater situational needs than others. Perhaps particularly when we’re talking about access to tertiary education. This could also be exacerbated by the global pandemic.

Image: Microsoft Design Toolkit by Kat Holmes

#4. With a great website comes great responsibility

“The world is working exactly as designed. And it’s not working very well. Which means we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power…Design is a craft with responsibility” – , Mike Monterio

Reduce, reuse, recycle…

Our evolving design system promotes a coherent, familiar and shared design language underpinned by design principles which support the principle of access for all. It ensures design patterns are reused, work isn’t repeated and user experience can be sustained.

Our evolving design system

As we redesign new services, we’re working with external accessibility organisations to independently assess our designs to ensure they meet accessibility standards so that people can easily access and use our services, regardless of any physical or mental disability.

Third-party supplier products are vetted as part of our procurement process to ensure they meet user needs, adhere to accessibility guidelines and provide an experience consistent with our existing products.

We work with existing suppliers to help improve the accessibility of their products with immediate fixes and feed into their product development roadmaps.

Our Student life section of the site has been redesigned for simplified journeys with more direct routes to completing key user goals. For example, applying for accommodation now follows patterns users are familiar with on commercial sites, allowing them to select rooms and locations which meet their individual needs. Users can now easily compare and save the key details of their accommodation options before applying.

Accommodation journey with key user goals

We have worked to harmonise the experience on the site and our third-party application system. Immediate changes included aligning and simplifying language and applying consistent design patterns. Changes to interactions and journeys require product development and have been fed into the supplier’s roadmap.

Journeys are supported by imagery and student stories showing the diverse community of people actively engaged in university life, but only when they meet user needs and add value. They help give users a feel for the place, what they can do, and what their lives might be like there.

Data, and being responsible with it

One of our principles is to, where useful, ingest existing data from various university systems to products and services. It’s then surfaced to users in focused locations in a familiar and accessible format. For example, staff profiles, which link staff to their research work, teaching activities and associations with organisations and people, now automatically base much of their structure on other reliable data sources.

Image: visualisation of staff profile product with key data sources

Ultimately this saves time for our internal users and allows our digital experts to concentrate on more involved tasks, as well as supporting a wide breadth of external user journeys. It also promotes one true source for structured data, accuracy and reduced maintenance overhead in the longer term. It will therefore be easier to sustain in the future, or innovate new solutions around user needs and have data that is used in a responsible and ethical way.

Conclusion: Behaviour change starts with the organisation

We have a lot more work to do. We’re at the start of a much bigger journey. As part of OneWeb, we are helping colleagues to streamline and organise our web estate, making it quicker for people to find the information they need. This in itself will help reduce our impact on the environment. But that’s not enough.

We have to change our behaviour, as individuals and organisations. Technology is rarely the key challenge:

• organising content is key
• focusing on quality over quantity is key
• designing to last is key

For some people, web content, and ‘digital’ feel cheap, easy to create and store – rather like ‘fast-fashion’. Many are used to ‘print’ and are concerned with perfection and completeness before publishing so content isn’t working as hard to meet people’s expectations. Why is that? Our key problems are social, not technological.

If user centred design is all about understanding people’s needs and delivering services that meet them, then it follows that we should consider the impact of those services have on our users and, by extension, our planet.

In the next few months, we will deliver a new digital user experience strategy, which will include guiding principles and governance. We’d like to hear from you as we get round to introduce it.

. Thanks for reading.

My immense thanks to all my contributors: Mark, Dan, Steve, Kate, Jonny.��

Resources we learn from:

• by Gerry McGovern
• by Tom Greenwood
• by Smashing Magazine
• from Kat Holmes for
• by Snook
• by Cennydd Bowles
• by Lou Downe

In this blog post, I would like to take a moment to share a few things that we’ve learned along the way. I will cover some thoughts on collaboration (especially at uncertain times), designing with users and trying to keep sane.

As a follow up to our , and just before we start with another huge stakeholder engagement effort, here are a few thoughts from a period of tremendous effort from my team.

Delivering a chunky programme phase is never more uncertain than when a global pandemic arrives at your doorstep.

#1. Create services and products that meet user needs

This may sound obvious: only design, write, develop services and products that meet a real person’s needs. Over the last few months, I have witnessed a huge increase in the demand for my team’s skills at a particular time where everything feels urgent. ‘Getting pulled in different directions’ was one of the main themes in our team’s retro – something I also experienced first hand.

Whilst we weathered the storm, I feel it is important to remind my colleagues across the University, who understandably sought fast solutions to complex problems, that (external) users who come looking for our services have a choice. They can easily go elsewhere and find an institution that will meet their needs better than we do. With difficult times upon us and more still on the horizon, reducing unnecessary choice and burdens for our users have become more important than ever.

There were many occasions in this phase where I had to ‘stick to my guns’ and express the importance of going through a user-centred design process properly (albeit rapidly or retrospectively at times) and advocating for our users. For example, if you’re a student who is about to start your journey at any given university, how critical is a good digital experience when no physical events or learning can take place?

I think there might be a misconception that user centred design (UCD) is a lengthy product development process. It doesn’t have to be.�� I’m grateful for the colleagues who have witnessed first hand the speed at which products can be created and delivered. They have put a lot of faith into our practice.��

At the same time,��in some areas we have seen knee-jerk solutions pushed through, which have not fully considered the problem they are attempting to solve. What would a good benchmark or KPI look like? How is it going to be evidenced? Issues and challenges that we’ve all been aware of for years have been magnified to the extreme because – guess what – when you design a digital service, the backend office gets exposed, and that’s not always a pretty sight!

#2. Simplicity isn’t simple, consistency is even harder

Holding the line is hard. Over the last few months, we conducted design research throughout the product build, facilitating multiple rounds of moderated usability testing to make sure we’re building the right thing for people as quickly as possible.

Some of our new designs may look very simple. But to get there we had to iterate several times as we developed our understanding of our users through their inclusion at all stages of design and testing. Our multidisciplinary teams relied and acted on users’ first-hand knowledge and feedback throughout, making it a point never to trust our first assumptions.

User testing in progress: only hard work makes things simple

#3. Users, not audiences

Audiences and users are not the same thing. The products we design and the content we write might have more than one user with a range of different needs. It’s not enough to imagine one kind of user.

One of my team members, Maria, said “just because we think that something might be the right thing to do, unless it’s proven by the real users, it’s not”.

Empirical evidence is the cornerstone of all good decision-making. You need to do research to learn about the range of users and their contexts. It’s important to find out about their specific and diverse needs, such as:

• another language other than English
• assistive technology they use to read content
• the range of devices they use to access information
• availability and quality of their internet connection
• other (non-digital) ways to access content

Accessibility requirements are an absolute must and one of our key guiding principles. We have to conform to and it is also an important requirement to meet user needs.

We’ve just completed an independent accessibility audit and we’re working through it to address some fundamentals before release. But it all becomes much more challenging when other teams don’t necessarily work in the same way as you. This results in a solution that, while technically correct, does not stand up to user needs scrutiny and is now too late to change.

Projects and activities should have a desired outcome – the anchor point. This remains fixed whilst the problem and solutions can change. For example:

• a problem to be solved: departments aren’t sharing enough data
• a solution to be implemented: what we need is a university-wide data sharing framework
• an outcome to be achieved: we want all departments to be able to easily access the information they need, in whatever format it might be held.

Outcomes based solution: the Design Council’s double diamond model��

Moving towards our desired outcome may raise additional practical questions, such as:

• What’s the easiest way to learn this fact?
• Where should you go if you want to find out more?
• Does this image and its position on the page help communicate a useful point?

The answer, always, is: the user knows.

We must adopt a different posture as an organisation, as stakeholders, and as colleagues – our opinions might be interesting, but are unlikely to be the final answer. Don’t seek to argue – seek to understand.

This might be unsettling to some because it contradicts many preconceived ideas about the way we should do things. We’re encouraging you to take this journey with us. It has great potential to change your perception of the problem and solution for the better.

#4. Working with us early

In large organisations there are always services, systems and content owned by other teams within the organisation. By far one of the most challenging parts of running a multi-year transformation programme is managing content requests as part of the business-as-usual workflow.

We’re currently working on a new easy step-by-step guide to help our team and stakeholders manage their content, provide feedback and suggestions. A few critical observations from recent activities may offer some further enlightenment to others who find themselves in the same situation:

Not all content is equal.

To understand what works and what doesn’t you need to identify what content is (and isn’t) used. Generally speaking, the more content you have, the more complexity you add for the user. There is no excuse for failing to analyse and evaluate your content, how it is performing, and how your users are accessing and consuming it. Put simply: you can’t measure your success (or need to improve) without measuring anything at all.

There is no substitute for observing people interacting with your services.

Watch your users struggle, do some readability tests, identify their pain points and respond accordingly by iterating your product. I know that user research is a craft, and we’re lucky to have a few in our teams. But even if you don’t have access to a user researcher, or you’re unable to talk to users, there are some things that you can do, such as .

Some content, websites and products need to retire.

Digital services and content, like all living things, have a lifecycle and lifespan. It helps if you have maintenance reviews where you take a look at performance analytics and user feedback to flag up areas that may need to be removed. This is something we are looking to address very soon.

I still don’t get FAQs.

Our organisation, like many others, still feels that FAQs are an effective way to communicate important information. They are not. Good structured content really matters. . We know people don’t think in terms of neatly framed questions and FAQs don’t assist natural online reading behaviour. .

Just by writing this, I can sense the palpitations of any content designer taking on a long list of FAQs, and trying to turn it into something useful against a tight deadline! This is also frustrating because it feels like we’re letting users down by not doing an adequate job in communicating vital information as effectively as we could. The misalignment between stakeholder perspectives and real user needs is the elephant in the room that needs addressing.

Caption: what the user really wants. From

Engage with us early.

Traditional ways of working have created habits that are difficult to break. The ‘right time’ to engage with our programme is often significantly earlier in the process than what our colleagues are used to. Ideally, we’d really like to ensure content design input is included from the inception of any relevant project, allowing us to work alongside colleagues who are strong subject matter experts from the very beginning. Content designers and other UX disciplines can provide invaluable points of view by representing the voice of the end user. We’re genuinely stronger when we work together, and it’s so much harder to implement good design at the end of a more traditional process.

Looking ahead

Over the last phase we’ve done as much as we can to tackle some difficult issues and we’ve tried to develop some shared understanding – in and outside our teams.��Putting users first can be hard and uncomfortable. Especially outside the protected scope of the programme. It’s a big shift for a lot of people and getting some to change or compromise, even a little, is hard.

This work matters. The teams are amazing. And now more than ever we have a massive role to play in the future of our university.

I look forward to seeing what new lessons we will learn along the next phase. Also worth remembering – nothing worth having is easily gained.

Our Show and Tells and product recording can be found in .

With thanks to all my contributors: Mark, Kate, Joe, Jonny, Andy and Maria.

Search engines have changed the way we find information, conduct research, shop, and connect with others. Content that contains relevant keywords leads to better user experience and brings more of the right users to our website.

Almost everything on the World Wide Web – whether it’s a website, blog, social network, or app – can be found via a search engine. Search engines have become a connecting force and directional guide to everyday life.

Did you know that the majority of our website visitors come from search engines? This is thanks to a mixture of the University’s brand and the efforts of the SEO team. A strong intertwined SEO strategy is challenging but rewarding. It gives us a competitive edge against some of the biggest universities online, which can feed successfully into user experience testing, content writing and marketing in general. By contrast, a poor strategy leads to higher pay-per-click costs, lower on-page interaction, and less traffic to the website as competitors focus their efforts.

SEO is about discovering opportunities and ensuring that we offer the best experience for both search engine crawlers and users.

Definitely easier said than done!

How do users find us on search engines?

This is something that we refer to as ‘search visibility’, literally: ‘how visible are we in Google’. This starts with a specific query a user has searched, for example undergraduate degree course, indicating our variable ranking position (which changes daily!). The majority of users only ever click on links from the first page of search results, so it is hugely important to climb to or maintain a high spot on the page.

To increase our search visibility, we need to ensure we are following best practice. The University competes against some huge websites – other universities, NHS, WhatUni – it’s not an easy task to increase our position by simply changing a few words. It requires a lot of effort, collaboration, and understanding of how our website is currently used.

It’s also worth noting that search positions do not change overnight, it’s gradual and all about trust of an information source. The more users visit our website and take actions on particular pages which are reflective of their initial query, the better the potential position for that query.

Below is a snippet from a dashboard of subjects categorised within Languages, where we’ve targeted 380 keywords to date. It’s worked out by:

1. Taking all rankings for all tracked keywords.
2. Applying an estimated click-through-rate (CTR) based on each ranking position. The CTR calculation ensures that higher ranking keywords are appropriately weighted in the score.
3. Adding all CTRs and dividing by the number of keywords we are tracking in that campaign, which gives a single metric of 0% -100%, calculated to 2 decimal points.

It is typical to aim for around 35% search visibility on average for targeted keywords. By using this indicator, we can measure search visibility over time to understand our impact in Google. We have some way to go, but there is a strong opportunity here and we have an ambitious goal.

*Search visibility can be represented through a scoring percentage using SEO analytics tools.

There are three main ways we are aiming to improve search visibility scoring:

• on-page optimisation
• overall site authority
• targeting more keywords

What have we found in practice?

Whilst working on keyword research for the education section of the website, we found unexplored opportunities due to changing search behaviours. This gave us a chance to focus our efforts in supplying content designers with high volume and highly relevant keyword phrases, to integrate with their content production.

It was and still is no small task, and work is still underway, but we’ve already found rewards within the first week. Content scores have increased from an average of 70 to around 95 and, with the new platform underway, we are predicting these will improve even further.

With a higher score, we have shown more effort for optimisation, adhering to best practice guidelines from search engines, thus in theory paving the way for us to appear not only higher in search engines but for more queries, expanding our search traffic potential. All of which can help with the University’s goals and strategy.

So what’s next for the SEO team?

SEO isn’t a singular project, it requires regular analysis, opportunity sizing, and optimisation – we have thousands of keywords being tracked across education and these will continue to grow, improve and be used as a benchmark for quality. SEO is an integral part of the content design process and content design is a crucial part of the SEO process. SEO is ‘baked’ throughout the entire product development process, to ensure that we are maximising our traffic potential and getting in front of the most relevant audiences.

With a new addition to the team, we’ll continue to provide knowledge and expertise across the University, including collaborating in content cycles and workflows.

Moving into the next phase will mean taking all of our keyword research and insight gathering, and stitching it together. We’ll map where each search query is being sent, uniting the website as a sole function and avoiding any content duplication. From a technical side, the implementation of our new CMS is definitely keeping us busy!

We’re recording our Show and Tell’s and posting these on the .

Please get in touch if you have any questions, and watch this space!

Written by: Kath Sellwood & Rayne Prendergast

With some colleagues from OneWeb I’ve recently completed a discovery (research) project looking at how well our current website meets the needs of prospective international students. We talked to many international students and many internal stakeholders. We also did a complete usability and analytics review of the current site.

The way we as a university view ‘international’ internally is replicated on our current website. We try to address international user needs through specific, separate pages – the international index and country pages. We forget to present all the rest of our content in a way that answers our international students’ questions and makes them feel like they will belong here. Unintentionally we are creating a sense of exclusion.

International students aren’t (that) different:

We discovered that our international students share all the same user needs and motivations as our UK students, but some of the information needs to be filtered through a ‘relevance lens’ (don’t just tell me about careers in the NHS, tell me what I can do when I go back to my home country). On top of this, international students have a set of informational needs (visas, arrivals, funding etc.) that are unique to them.

Routes to our university as an international student can be more varied and complicated than for our UK students. Even when using an agent or a partner institution, however, international students cite university websites as the most useful resource in their decision making (). Our prospective international students are using our website just as our UK students are, investigating the course first and then exploring life and practicalities.

So, how is OneWeb going to ensure that every piece of content we create speaks to the needs of our prospective international (and EU) students as well as our UK students?

Better content, starting now:

We’re starting right now with the new ‘Life in’ content. This content looks at our cities, our campuses, our halls of residence and our student communities. For every page we’re asking:

• have we answered all the key questions that both UK and international students will have?
• have we represented a broad range of students in our imagery?
• have we shown a range of content that will help people from the UK and overseas feel they will belong here?
• have we written in plain English, without assuming any prior knowledge of idioms or abbreviations?
• have we helped all our users, but particularly those from overseas, picture our city, halls and campuses and understand how those elements connect?

For example, our new ‘student communities’ page now highlights the rich variety of international societies our Students’ Union offers, allows users to explore places of worship near our campuses and highlights the thriving entrepreneurial community we have here. We’re also planning to pull-in stories from our wonderful ‘’ Instagram feed.

Many international students love that the UK has seasons, because they don’t have them at home. When choosing our campus pictures, therefore, we’re looking to reflect this and include beautiful pictures of snow and autumn as well as summer.

Spreading and embedding:

There are many teams within OneWeb working on different sections of content. As soon as we had our findings we ran a ‘’ for the whole team so that everyone is now working to a set of guidelines that ensure international user needs are always considered.

And OneWeb aren’t the only people creating content. It’s important that we share what we’ve learned about our international users with our marketing and communications colleagues so that all our touchpoints are inclusive.

Being international resonates with UK students too:

“68% of young people in the UK believe international experience and a global outlook are essential for their personal goals.”

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This kind of data tells us that we shouldn’t be afraid to embed our internationalism in all our content, because our UK students also want to gain skills for a global marketplace.

We’re actually adding a new page into the ‘student life’ section of the website that will promote the opportunities we offer all our students, wherever they come from, because we are an international university.

This page, and the community page, have tested really well with prospective students both from the UK and overseas.

A word about language:

As part of our research, I had a brilliant conversation with Dr Jill Doubleday, Senior Teaching Fellow in the University’s Academic Centre for International Students. Jill is passionate about ensuring our teaching is inclusive and works for everybody, no matter where in the world they come from. I was relieved to hear from her that, whilst there are cultural sensitivities to be aware of (particularly in imagery) the key is writing to the principles of plain English, principles that already lie at the heart of the OneWeb project. The advice was to just keep doing what we’re doing.

Data – the final frontier:

Alongside embedding international user needs in all our content, we do have some challenges ahead to meet the specific, practical needs of international students around entry requirement equivalencies, visa information and funding. These issues are ones that OneWeb cannot solve alone; they need a cross-university approach to pull together our data into formats that can feed all our digital content, embedding the data in content wherever it’s most relevant. With the current challenges of COVID-19 that ambition has had to be put on ice, but I’m hopeful that in a future blog I’ll be able to return and share how we have cracked it!

Thanks for reading.

If you’d like to know more about international user needs read our

Nice crop Jonny – well done

I had just come off a few days of content design training and my head was filled with new ideas that I was excited to bring back to my role as a social media monkey officer for the University of Southampton.

Almost exactly a year later and a little unexpectedly, I’ve just started a new job as a content designer. Having been in the role for a month now, this feels like a good time to reflect and update.

The last blog talked a big game about the theory of content design, but how does it all work in practice? Here’s what I’ve learned:

It’s a bit like solving puzzles

When I’m not pretending to be a functioning adult human being, I play a lot of videogames.

A��lot.

The content design process isn’t all that different to a videogame. You have:

• a goal
• some rules about how you can achieve your goal
• a few obstacles you’ll have to overcome to get there

Our team is currently updating the University’s postgraduate taught (PGT) course pages. Granted, this ‘game’ wouldn’t win many awards in the gaming industry, but here’s how it plays:

• Goal:��make our PGT course pages as user-friendly as possible, so that our users can do what they came here to do as easily as possible.
• Rules:��the content must be accessible, digestible and accurate. And it has to capture the attention of prospective students.
• Obstacles:��the information and resources we need in order to do this are often fragmented, inconsistent or non-existent.

As you can imagine, this game calls on us to be resourceful and adaptable. We learn new things every day. Sometimes this means we move forward, and other times it means a few steps back to change things based on new information.

Of course, there’s no sense in playing if you don’t keep score!

We’ll be using analytics and other performance indicators to see how the changes we’ve made affect our users’ behaviour on the website. We’ll know we’ve won when we have data to show that they��are completing��their��goals more easily than before.

Room for creativity

My early impression of the content design approach to writing copy was that, while effective, it would result in a lot of homogenisation. Can you really be creative when you’re confined to writing in Plain English, adhering to a style-guide, and (at least in this case) following a very prescriptive template?

A far cry from the dizzying literary heights of Twitter-based duck poetry.

Turns out: yes, you can.

We’re a team of 6 content designers, all following the same guidance and rules, with all of our work being reviewed and signed off by the same people. And yet our output has so much variation that we can easily tell who’s written what.

That’s not to say we’re being inconsistent in quality; the main beats are all there no matter whose content you look at. But even when you’ve accounted for all of the similarities, �ٳ�����’s still loads of room for personal style!��

That’s good for us because we get to be creative in our work. More importantly though, it’s good for the user because the content flows naturally and is easy to act upon.

There’s no substitute for due diligence

Here’s a look at the steps we take when we’re working on a PGT course page:

1. Gather our sources. At the moment we’re using a combination of the following to inform our content:
   • current live course page
   • programme specification
   • curriculum and module information
   • faculty subject brochure
2. Complete each field in the template for the new course page, using this information.
3. Review the first draft ourselves to ensure it’s accurate and hasn’t missed anything important.
4. Submit for review by our senior content designer, John, who suggests improvements based on established content design principles.
5. Update the template based on his feedback.
6. And finally, factcheck the content with a subject matter expert (SME). In this case, that’s the course leader.

Recent developments in the wider world have made step 6 a little trickier to manage at the moment, but we’ll be getting onto it at the first chance we have. What I want to illustrate here is that every piece of content goes through several passes before going live.

It’s practically impossible to keep every single content design principle front of mind while you’re creating. Does this content work for someone using a screen-reader? What about someone whose first language isn’t English? Or someone who only has 20 minutes to look at it before they pick up their kids from school?

On top of that, human brains tend to get a bit fried after a few hours of staring at a screen. There’s only so much creative work you can do before you’re burned out for the day.

For these reasons, it’s vital to go over things more than once with a fresh perspective each time. We have to make sure that this content serves everyone, not just us.

Speaking of which…

Nothing works without empathy

Our mantra is ‘user needs first’.

What this means in practice is forgetting everything you think you know about what people need. As a budding content designer, I have had to learn very quickly that unfounded assumptions won’t get me very far.

Sarah Richards,

You need to take a step back and put yourself in other people’s shoes. You need to see things from their point of view, and use any empirical evidence you’ve gathered about this to inform everything you do.

Empathy is a skill you can learn, just like any other. If you’ve never needed to use a screen-reader to get information from a webpage, it may not immediately occur to you that something you’ve written won’t play well with such a tool. It takes practice to start seeing the world differently to the way you always have before.

It’s not just users though. We have other stakeholders to work with and their perspective is valid too. We’re conscious that we’ll eventually be sitting down with course leaders to go over changes we’ve made to content they spent days, maybe even weeks putting together.

When that time comes, empathy will be the difference between ‘correction’ and ‘collaboration’. This is not an exercise in telling our SMEs that their hard work is somehow wrong. Our goal is to work with them to make sure we’ve captured everything they want to say in a way that works for everyone who reads it. We can’t do that unless we understand their hopes and concerns too.

Same content. Different user experience.

I’ll leave it there for now. I hope this has given you a useful insight into the work going on behind the scenes at OneWeb HQ. If you’re eager to learn more, I recommend having a look at this post on user research by fellow content designer, Claire Furnish.

If you have any questions, please get in touch!

User research is important

According to user research focuses on:

Understanding behaviours, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.

Content designers put user needs front and centre. We’re 30 years on from the creation of the web and user experience is now a mature field. We can’t therefore underestimate the sophistication of today’s web users. They have:

• little time
• many distractions
• high expectations

An often quoted metric from the confirms how little written content users actually read on the average web page:

On the average web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

This makes relevance and usefulness a high priority for any organisation. Since finding information is the main activity of a visitor to our website, we need to help them do or find what they need. User research gives us the information to design content that meets their requirements.

Useful content is good for business

If our content isn’t meeting user needs we’re essentially operating in broadcast mode, holding our breath and hoping for the best. That’s bad for the user and bad for business.

So making content useful is mutually beneficial. You’re respecting users by giving them what they need and you’re valuing their time. Plus, you’re meeting the objectives of the business.

The organisation benefits by:

• saving time
• improving productivity
• avoiding rework costs
• enhancing reputation
• generating trust

Really, it is a no-brainer!

We are not our users

Nor are we mind-readers. If we don’t do research we’re making guesses about who is using our site and what their needs are. Thinking hard about what they might need, while commendable, is meaningless. It’s evidence we want. We wouldn’t make assumptions about a piece of academic research before the findings are known, so why do it with our users?

Source:

And we mustn’t forget that our users are human beings – complex, unique and surprising. As Maya says: ‘We don’t know what they don’t know.’ Visually impaired users, for example, have specific requirements which include catering for screen-reading software.

Informing our actions using data is the University’s lifeblood so it makes perfect sense to align this approach with our content development.

Don’t ask users what they think

Short and sweet, but what a user thinks and what a user does are often radically different. It’s a mistake some people make and they’re left scratching their heads when applying their findings changes nothing. This is why observation is an essential technique in the user research toolkit.

More participants isn’t a guarantee of better results

When you’re planning your recruitment brief, recruiting more participants won’t necessarily mean you’ll have a better quality research outcome. Making sure you have a representative sample is more valuable.

Choosing the right timings, location and duration for your research sessions is also crucial – what works well for current engineering postgraduates may not work well for graduate-entry nursing enquirers. Mature students who might be working parents, for example, will have a host of contextual distractions. It’s also important to factor these distractions into the content we create for them.

Representative samples are important to ensure the right people are part of your group
Source: courtesy of Maya Wiseman

Defining research goals and questions are must-do’s

Goals are there to identify, understand and gauge a problem by answering a series of questions such as:

• how are people using this page?
• what do they want from it?
• why aren’t they completing their task?

Good questions are about users rather than services, and they must have an implication for the work. If they don’t, rework or remove them entirely.

It’s fine to mix things up

Apparently using mixed methods is on trend! But it’s true that most projects would benefit from a minimum of several approaches. It’s also wise to carefully consider the most appropriate method for your scenario rather than plumping for techniques you are most familiar with.

For example, using both quantitative and qualitative techniques provides very different but equally valuable and often complementary findings.

Some methods are outlined in this table. Each has its place in helping surface the detail needed to inform content development.

Staying useful is a continual evolution

One constant we can be sure of is change, and in my new role it’s all about embracing it. After all, the habits and behaviours of our web visitors, whether they’re prospective students, members of our local community or potential research partners, do not remain the same.

By putting users at the heart of our process we can ensure our content continually evolves and stays useful.

Proving value

As content designers we recognise that user research is a team sport and can be hugely beneficial to the University. The more we learn about our users and the more we share our knowledge, the more value we can deliver.

As a team, we test and iterate content with users regularly. We want to ensure that they can find it, understand it and act on it. If they struggle, we tweak and refine until it perfectly meets their user needs – or, at least, a bit more perfectly than it did before.

Moving forward, we want to shout more loudly about our successes. We want to be tracking metrics that matter and prove the value of user-centred content to the University. We want to share what we’ve learnt about our users and ensure that those findings inform every part of the University’s communications.

If we don’t meet user needs, we can’t expect to meet business needs.

A big thank you to Maya and everyone who contributed to this post. Some further user research reading (courtesy of Maya):