In this blog, I’ve partnered with San Basnayake, a software engineer from our iSolutions team, to share insights on how our effective collaboration drives better outcomes, strategic breakthroughs, and enhanced accessibility for all users.

The importance of dialogue

Following a recent show and tell, we were asked how much communication was required to achieve this outcome. The answer is, always, A LOT! I’d say that 80% of our time is about communication.

We’ve seen it many times before: simply sending over static files during the initial design handover stage can lead to confusion and missed opportunities. It’s crucial to facilitate dialogues to prevent this.

One clear example is our discussion about the scalability of components, such as our block card system, which currently accommodates 3 cards. Let’s be honest, users’ needs change over time, as do the needs of the business. So, what if we needed to add more down the line? By discussing scalability early on, we can anticipate future technical requirements. Designers can provide insights into the rationale behind design decisions, while developers like San can propose optimisations to ensure smooth functionality.

This collaborative approach from the outset helps us create a more adaptable product capable of evolving without extensive revisions.

Enhancing design clarity

When immediate discussions aren’t possible, we start by sharing Figma designs for developers to review asynchronously. To enhance clarity, we use annotations to provide additional context to our design files. Personally, I’ve found Figma’s Dev Mode invaluable for labelling and clarifying variables. We’ve also recently integrated Stark, a useful Figma plugin that streamlines the annotation of elements such as tab order, landmarks, and ARIA labels. These tools are instrumental in providing engineers like San with the necessary context to quickly grasp design specifics.

Additionally, screen recording is an invaluable tool for designers. It allows us to conduct detailed walkthroughs of the design file, which can then be shared as a resource across the team for future reference.

Welcoming feedback during development

Collaboration shouldn’t be limited to the UX and development team. Feedback and engagement from the whole Digital User Experience team is welcome. Take our content designers, for instance: they recently faced a user interface (UI) issue in Drupal where they had to scroll down the entire page to find the section they needed to edit.

By working together and discussing the problem, we came up with a solution: a left-hand menu for easier navigation. This small but effective fix made a big difference and showed how teamwork can enhance the overall user experience.

Screen-sharing for enhanced UX/Dev accessibility work

As we get to the final stages of the UX/Dev handover, screen-sharing sessions become crucial. San and I often use screen sharing to go through content management in the live environment and make sure all accessibility features—like landmarks, ARIA labels, and focus states—are correct.

And it’s not just a one-time thing; we use screen sharing throughout the process. San’s ability to make quick UI changes on the spot allows us to catch any issues early on and make necessary adjustments in real-time. Due to our restricted access to the codebase, observing a developer’s screen offers insights that we wouldn’t otherwise have.

Testing

During testing in Pre-Production (PPRD) before releases, we uncover any bugs and simulate the end-user experience. As humans, we’re prone to making mistakes and overlooking things, so having another person’s perspective is essential. Knowledge sharing is key: UX designers know site components well, so we’re able to efficiently cross-check areas that might’ve been affected, while engineers’ backend expertise ensures smooth integration and performance. This thorough testing phase ensures our site is ready for launch, minimising the risk of potential issues when live.

Testing occurs continuously and extends beyond the release phase. We regularly assess the UI and functionality of our site, utilising JIRA as our ticketing system to address any issues promptly. This approach ensures the ongoing upkeep of our website, encompassing both our code base and design system.

Recently, we encountered an inconsistency with fonts: while our design system specified only 4 fonts, the code base included over 60. This discrepancy resulted in slower loading times and a cluttered backend. Upon San’s feedback, we standardised the fonts across the code base and design system to resolve the issue.

This brings us to another important issue…

Maintenance and continuous improvement

In the world of design and engineering, not all tasks are created equal. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build, and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

We design, we prototype, we work with end-users and the business to ensure we create something better and more valuable to what was there before. Anything that falls into the category of ‘new stuff’ or ‘innovation’ always feels a lot more exciting. Maintenance and continuous improvements are undervalued, but they are most important – because they tend to offer more value to the end user and ultimately the organisation.

I enjoy pairing with engineers and other disciplines such as user researchers, content designers, and product experts because it allows us to have a conversation about design choices. It helps to reason my decisions and what considerations we’re making for any future iterations, whether they are design-orientated or more technical aspects of the product. This knowledge helps us, as a team, to build empathy with one another and a more supportive environment.

Final thoughts

Effective UX and engineering collaboration goes beyond traditional handoffs. By maintaining open communication, anticipating future needs, and conducting thorough final checks, teams create adaptable, user-friendly products that align with strategic goals. Embracing this approach ensures systems evolve alongside user needs and business objectives.

There is a lot more to say on this topic. One thing that I would like to echo is that it makes a lot of good business sense. Many practitioners would advocate for this kind of ongoing collaborative work – it’s better for your users, and better for the organisation’s reputation. In its own way, it also supports innovation.

This meant a lot to us, because a few years ago user research and design insights were not used to drive strategic outcomes at our university. Following our latest win, I was asked by a number of people from inside and outside the higher education sector to explain how we managed to establish user research and other human-centred functions more widely, given the cultural challenges often encountered at universities. I was also asked about the difference it made over time.

For context, I work at the University of Southampton (UoS) where I head the Digital User Experience function. It includes human-centred design disciplines (content design, UX and interaction design, user research) as well as performance, product and delivery disciplines.

Diagram 1: our disciplines work together

Like many other higher education institutions, Southampton is a complex organisation, with strategic objectives that span research, education, and enterprise. It is also a Russell Group university, research intensive university and while it is gazing towards the future, it also embraces its heritage, which occasionally provides an interesting viewpoint when looking at generating a change.

None of what I am going to describe here was easy (sorry, not sorry ). I view it with a philosophical lens: it is an evolutionary process rather than a revolutionary one. It is a journey through an ever-changing landscape that has no end because complex organisations have complex ecosystems that require careful navigation over time, and nothing ever stays the same.
This blog post is about some steps and lessons learned along the way if you are thinking of setting up user research and design disciplines in your organisation.

Lesson 1: genuine commitment to learning supported by a vision

Learning about people who use your products and services is an organisational commitment. The same applies to putting frameworks in place that allow teams to succeed.

As a starting point and beautifully coined by : “If your organization isn’t prepared to learn, it doesn’t matter how much research you do”.

In 2019, we embarked on our digital transformation journey and the was born. There were two key principles at its core: adoption of a human-centred approach, and agile working practices. The mandate was to find the overlapping value between what the University requires and what the end-user needs, starting with the website. Fundamentally, the OneWeb programme was about investing to achieve defined target outcomes.

In reality, an organisation needs to buy results and it accesses those results by implementing the practice. In this case, it is human or user-based research and design. In order to learn about the people who visit our website, we had to take on the first step towards building empathy. Empathy starts with user research…

As many of you know, user research gives you the opportunity to speak to, observe, and/or hear from your target audiences, giving you first-hand insight into who they are, the problems they encounter, and what they might need from the product you’re designing.

It’s fair to say that at the time, and even occasionally now years later, there is still a fundamental misunderstanding about user research, what it is, how long it takes and why you should do it (but let’s not digress – this is a whole topic for another blog post!). Luckily for me, at the time, the organisation was prepared to buy the results of this approach at scale, even though it perhaps didn’t fully understand the methodology itself.

My team researched, investigated and designed a lot of core services with end users, involving hundreds of stakeholders along the way. What we discovered and validated is different audiences’ needs and how they’re linked to one another from an end user’s unique perspective. This is the underpinning blueprint to the journeys people want to take, which in return help meet university objectives. Win-win.

The key lesson is that user research and human-centred disciplines do not happen in vacuum. You need to get commitment from the top, mandate to operate in this way and understand the competitive advantage it can serve the wider organisation longer-term. In all honesty, mandate and commitment has wavered at times, and this is why it is clear to me how vital it is for delivering useful results. There has to be a strategic intent as it needs hooking directly to a strategy, policy and standards, or at the very minimum – have agreements in place. And in order to deliver return on investment, you need some clear targets or well-defined benefits you are going to achieve by implementing the practice.

Lesson 2: pairing team members with experienced practitioners

When you secure commitments, knowledge transfer is the next important component of our ways of working. Initially we invested in bringing in experienced user researchers, content designers and other professionals who paired with members of the team or interns that learned the ropes, methodology and were able to put their knowledge into practice. I also looked internally where I could find talent, such as career services or working directly with the heads of schools in academic areas of related disciplines, for example, psychology, software engineering, languages, game design to name but a few.

In the background I worked with my new friends in Human Resources (HR) and finance on setting up disciplines that were brand new to the organisation, including user research, UX and interaction design, as well as budgets to fund these roles.

On a practical level this meant creating discipline pathways, getting job descriptions written, and getting them graded via panels. All of it had to be done quickly because of annual budgets, plus it’s hard to go to market and find people that were skilled to get the job done. This was a huge undertaking and a challenge especially when the pandemic hit the world.

Recruitment is always rather challenging due to market conditions. At that time, it meant salaries were high, the market favoured contract jobs rather than permanent roles and skilled people were in shortage.

It was a risk to what we might be able to deliver in the programme’s timeframes because your budget can only go so far and there was a lot to do. Also, the organisation will only have a certain amount of patience for the benefits it’s waiting for and this is not always something that is easy to gauge.

My strategy for recruitment was always about ‘growing my own (talent)’. It was also about spotting existing talent in people who might not have had the opportunity to work in a particular field but demonstrated transferable skills and a healthy attitude to learning. In some places I took calculated risks by appealing to potential prospects in different ways. Money and job security is important as basic hygiene conditions, but equally important is the culture and type of work you build in teams.

I strongly believe that if you adhere to these core principles, you are likely to yield results and build an organisational competency longer-term that many overlook in support of short-term gains. We had some great successes with internships, something that I am keen to carry on and develop further. I believe that it’s important to give people opportunities as it’s hard to get a break in these disciplines.Taking the principle of knowledge transfer from OneWeb, finding talent that would want to learn and pursue this as a career path, develop them in-house ‘on the job’ was, and still is, the key game in town. This was fundamental to not only the user research discipline, but also to others.

My advice is to get clear on what you really want to accomplish with disciplines’ time and skills, articulate clearly what kind of team culture you are looking to build and encourage people with similar ethos to apply for jobs. You also need patience, drive and tenacity to see your vision through.

Oh – and make friends with your HR and Finance colleagues because that will determine how quickly you are able to get wonderful people embedded in your team!

Lesson 3: setting up teams for success

This is where your promise needs to live up to expectations you’ve set. It’s also where frameworks, tools and processes come into their own. Research Operations (ResearchOps) is so much more than just getting in user researchers. It is about a shift in mindset across all disciplines and training everyone from the ground up.

To start with, when recruiting or developing our team culture, everyone has to care about the people who are using our services. A culture of empathy is needed to ensure we translate various points of views around common grounds. We need to enable a two-way street with our users and the organisation so we build a shared appreciation. Basically, empathy is the bridge, and let’s face it – there isn’t enough of it in the world, so I think it is a pretty good idea! It is also about opening our work and methodology to others, including colleagues from the organisation. By doing so, our research, insights and designs are more likely to get accepted in the first place.

Some of the processes, stepping stones and measures that we put in place were a combination of informal and formal elements such as:

• Firstly, setting up heads of disciplines was fundamental and it has two aspects to it. There is an organisational element recognising the need and value (following the transformation programme) and an adoption process. The second part to it is more to do with ‘getting our house in order’ as part of the team. This is important because any leads or heads of discipline will bring their own perspectives and will want to improve how we do things as a discipline and collectively. You need solid foundations for things to work well.
• Documentation of the user needs and making sure these are mapped to journey and performance measures. This is where we use different disciplines to work together and get the best of all worlds: user researchers and performance analysts can be best friends! While performance describes the ‘what’ pretty well, it has a much bigger value when the ‘why’ is explained via qualitative insights. It’s that corroboration of data and insights that makes it meaningful to leadership.
• Ensuring all key processes are done to highest standards such as Data Protection, inclusive user research practices, and ethic approval processes are all in place to enable speedy recruitment when we need to.
• Recruitment of participants can be challenging at times, so internal means of recruitment (as well as external) are very important. Those of us who work for universities are surrounded by options, so talk with other teams/departments, collaborate and find ways to attract and incentivise those you end up talking to!
• Showing our work via informal mechanisms such as show and tell sessions with the delivery teams. We also present and report our work more formally to stakeholders, so they can appreciate the wider perspective that is required to come up with a design.
• The big difference from my point of view is that all colleagues are invited to observe, or take notes in user research sessions. We’ve opened it to members of our community who have a stake in the projects we work on. This proved to be invaluable when stakeholders hear directly from an end user about the specific issues they encountered when trying to use a product on the website. It has not been unusual to hear university colleagues asking whether it would be possible to change something after they directly observe the issues. We’ve also opened up our research and design synthesis sessions with a clear process which our user researchers facilitate to help inform the designs. These help us to show our work and how we arrived at a particular design.

My tip here is it will always be better to show, rather than tell! Always involve others where you can and be clear how insights are communicated widely objectively.

describes it well when he says that “the most significant value that UX can bring to an organisation is to turn everyone into the world’s foremost experts in who their users are and what they need.

To pull that off, you’ll need to conduct research. Research that develops the expertise in who the users are and what the users need.”

For that you need a mindset shift – it needs buy-in, commitment, involvement of others because it is no longer just down to you to be an expert about your users.

Summary

I don’t want to paint the impression that I have all the answers. The reality is that this is a long journey that needs determination because there is always another bend in the road, or a mountain to overcome.

I would also acknowledge that it’s also hard to predict when (any) organisations might lose interest and their patience runs out when you invest time up front in investigating a problem. I get it. This is why you need to get the perceived value for user research, ResearchOps and any other discipline or practice to that effect, as quickly as possible. You also need to continue delivering results as a team to ensure you are renewing the faith of the organisation along the way. That can be hard because tangible impact is what matters most to the organisation.

To win an award was gratifying for all the work to be recognised, but I also acknowledge that there is a lot more to do. All that glitter is well-deserved, but it is not about perfection. This work simply helps us understand what is the actual problem we need to solve for our audiences and how we can do our minimal viable product right, first time round. That in itself brought efficiency, reduced costs longer-term, and brought a competitive advantage.

Understanding your audiences is also a moving target. Our audiences need us to keep up with their needs as they change. That takes commitment. It’s why iterations and continual learning about people is important. User needs shift and change over time, and we need to keep up with that. We have great examples of it and it does help when you take it back in front of the organisation.

From a leadership point of view, any implementation of disciplines, processes and frameworks has to be sustainable and embedded into organisational strategies. Don’t get me wrong – building a strong practice is great and I’m obviously a big advocate of it, but what the organisation buys is results. Showing how your team’s work helps the organisation achieve its aims is time well spent. Like it or not, organisations may never be interested in the practice, but it will always be interested in results.

Hey!

My name is Charisma, and over the past six months I’ve had the incredible opportunity to work as an intern with the digital user experience team at the University of Southampton. It’s been nothing short of enlightening, allowing me to gain hands-on experience in various aspects of user experience (UX) design and research.

Graduation day in front of Winchester Cathedral

I’m excited to share with you what I’ve been up to, the challenges I’ve faced and invaluable lessons I’ve learned during this journey.

My background

Before diving into the details, let me give you a bit of background about myself. I’m a graduate with a degree in Game Design and Art from Winchester School of Art. During my 3-year course, I was introduced to UX design by my first-year lecturer, who also happened to be a User Experience Designer/Researcher.��

Later in my academic journey, between my second and third years of study, I had the opportunity to work alongside her and a small team during a summer internship as a Game Designer. This experience enabled me to collaborate and gain first-hand insight into the world of UX design. That’s when I decided to really dig in and get a better handle on this field.��

Subsequently, I ramped up my commitment to user-centred design. I tackled my final major project with enthusiasm, leveraging UX tools and methodologies to place user needs at the forefront.��

Fast forward a bit, and here I am! Thanks to the incredible network at the University of Southampton, I landed the opportunity to be part of their award-winning Digital User Experience team. It’s been quite a ride, and I’m eager to share more of it with you.��

Getting started

I joined the team during a bustling period, with one project starting while another was wrapping up. This was quite a challenging transition for me, as I was eager to soak up as much knowledge as possible, granted there was a lot going on. To gain a deeper understanding of the University and the team’s dynamics, I had one-to-one meetings with various team members, spanning from Content Design to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and everything in between. Not only did this exercise provide me with invaluable insights, it was also a great way to put names to faces and really get to know the personalities driving the show.��

One of my initial assignments involved redesigning a social media component. This project served as a helpful opportunity for me to put my skills into practice and enhance my proficiency with Figma, one of the tools the team use for prototyping. Additionally, it allowed me to sharpen my research abilities and cultivate my iterative design approach, which is great as it benefits the end user and the organisation both in the short and long term. In the short run, we’re delivering products and services that are friendlier and more adaptable to our users. Looking ahead, these skills mean we’re on a path to continually improve, saving resources, and building a reputation for quality and innovation, contributing to the university’s sustained success and growth.��

Throughout the project, I consistently collaborated with the UX team, sharing my work and making refinements based on feedback. Being part of a multidisciplinary team is advantageous because it:��

• Incorporates diverse perspectives��
• Ensures quality��
• Keeps a user-centric approach��
• Enhances design efficiency��
• Promotes teamwork��
• Guarantees ongoing improvements��
• Minimises post-launch risks��

Collectively, these factors lead to improved products that provide better outcomes for their users and, by extension, the organisation.

I also had the opportunity to showcase my work during my first show-and-tell session. Nothing better than showing your work to the team early. This was a chance to share what I’ve done with the wider digital user experience team, which pushed me out of my comfort zone and at the same time enhanced my communication skills.��

Collaboration and Teamwork

One standout aspect of my internship is the strong emphasis on collaboration. I work with diverse teams, including designers, researchers, developers, and product/delivery managers. We have regular stand-up meetings to keep one another in sync and updated, which was a new experience for me. This collaborative environment not only enriches my learning but also exposes me to the intricacies of cross-discipline teamwork.��

Moreover, we use , a powerful collaborative platform, to enhance our workflow. Prior to this internship, I hadn’t used Miro extensively, but I’ve learnt how invaluable the tool is for ideation, planning, and project coordination. It allows us to create digital whiteboards, share ideas in real time, and visually brainstorm together. My collaboration skills have improved, and I’ve also developed a deeper appreciation for the benefits of such tools in modern teamwork.��

Agile Framework

In the fast-paced world of digital user experience, I’ve learned that agility is essential. Through my engagement in an agile framework, using tools like Jira, and taking part in sprint planning and retrospectives, I’ve embraced the iterative nature of projects. I’ve seen how this approach cultivates adaptability and responsiveness to shifting priorities, all while keeping a strong commitment to user-centred design.��

Dedication to Accessibility

One of the most rewarding experiences so far has been taking part in our team’s Accessibility Workshop in support of ������Ƭ Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). This event strongly emphasised the significance of crafting digital experiences that are inclusive and accessible to all users. During the workshop, I learned from sessions, such as an introduction to screen readers, and engaged in group discussions, which greatly improved my comprehension of accessible design principles.��

Images from our Accessibility Day Workshop

Also, I’ve been working with the team on what we call a ‘website accessibility health check’, where we’ve systematically tested the site for any accessibility-related issues that might hinder user navigation. Any problem we find gets addressed by raising tickets for resolution. By doing so, I’ve become more familiar with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and accessibility testing tools, which have really helped me understand how accessibility works. �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� �� ��

Figma

During my time at university, I dabbled in to create UI mock-ups, prototypes, and play-test designs, but I never fully explored its time-saving and efficiency features. However, I’ve quickly learned a lot about the tool and its capabilities over the past few months.��

For the first time, I had the opportunity to work on a design system, which introduced me to the complexities of keeping consistency across various digital touchpoints. I was amazed at the workflow streamlining that they can bring to the table.��

I’ve been actively involved in the redesign of components within our UI toolkit, using the Tailwind CSS framework. This endeavour is geared toward maintaining a cohesive design system and improving our process for delivering designs to developers, promoting better practices for collaboration and efficiency.��

What’s next?

Our latest project, ‘,’ has just kicked off, and I’ve jumped into my first discovery phase. Currently, I’m helping with user interviews and diving deep into a competitor review analysis, after supporting in some stakeholder workshops and conducting competitor research. It’s my first time going through a project lifecycle, from start to finish, and I’m excited about it!��

I’ve still got a ton to learn. For instance, I’ve only recently begun getting the hang of As-Is mapping, and I’m on a mission to build up my confidence overall as a beginner User Experience Designer.��

I’d like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the entire digital user experience , with a special shout-out to Steve and Piret for being incredible mentors and guiding me through my first journey into UX. I also extend a big thank-you to my course leader, Adam Procter, and Ayala, my manager, for giving me this incredible opportunity to advance my career.��

On that note, don’t hesitate to explore the opportunities our university offers! I was pleasantly surprised by the support I received as both a student and an alumnus. The network and resources are exceptional, and your skills could contribute significantly. For further details, reach out to Ayala Gordon.��

If you’d like to know more about my experience or have any questions, I’m also happy to talk!

How this is done depends on the organisation, but it usually includes making services simpler to use and cheaper to run.

Transformations in the University, to date, existed in the OneWeb programme. This work spanned over a few years, and resulted in a lot of change for everyone involved.

OneWeb was a ‘user-centred transformation’. This means that improving users’ experience was our first priority.

As a university, our aim is to make the admission journey easier for people to apply for courses, and for other user groups such as researchers, funders, companies to be able to find information in the way that makes sense to them, in their own context.

Our design principles and standards

Our design principles and standards reflect how we think about design. They provide a way for us to look at the work we create, how we create it, building the right thing and more importantly, building it right.

No one should be prevented from interacting with us or using our services. We believe in removing barriers. To help us do this, we must meet these standards.

Our design standards help us create and maintain good digital products and services. They instruct our choices and the work we produce. We use them to assess whether we’re doing a good job. These standards are universal: we can apply them to everything we do regardless of channel or product.

Understand users and their needs

We’re finding out who the users are, including the less obvious users.

Design and build whole journeys

We don’t force users to understand how the university works; we design joined up end-to-end services based on what users need.

Make it simple to use

Remove complexity for users, even if this makes our work more challenging.

Make sure everyone can use it confidently

We remove barriers to services. We research and design with inclusion and diversity in mind. We put our designs in front of people with access needs to find out any barriers and issues.

Use the right content at the right time, in the right way

We use data and evidence to understand what content users need and when they need it. Create content that helps people achieve what they need to do.

Iterate and improve frequently

Make improvements throughout the lifetime of the product or service. Focus on improvements that add value for users.

Define what success looks like and measure performance

We define what we want to achieve from the start. We identify the right metrics, then baseline, then track performance against them.

What’s in scope for the July release?

The big services and journeys that are in scope for our July release are:

1. Study pages
2. Study highlights
3. Study facilities
4. Research facilities
5. Staff profiles
6. Research areas
7. Research Projects
8. Research Groups, Centres, Institutes
9. Postgraduate Research (PGR) – how to apply
10. About our university section to include representation of faculties, schools and departments

We will release a full roadmap, including planned releases and mechanism for feedback, soon.

What is dark mode?

With the introduction of dark mode (night mode, dark theme), users can adopt a dark system-wide appearance. The dark mode inverts the device’s display to a light-coloured typography and UX elements on a dark background.

There are good reasons why users choose to set their devices to dark mode:

• it’s easier on the eyes, reducing digital eye strain.
• it reduces screen brightness, saving your battery life.
• it can improve content legibility, making it easier to consume content.

Caption: Gen Z use dark mode to combat eye strain

Gen Z, our target audience, are the first digital natives, constantly connected online and spending over 5 hours a day on their phones*. With so much time spent online, they use dark mode to relieve eye strain. It’s not just this age group adopting this setting, 82% of all mobile users now have the setting activated**.

The dark mode setting is available on mobile, tablet, and PC. All users can activate the setting system-wide or through an application. This includes:

• PC and laptop operating systems – Windows and Apple macOS
• Mobile devices – Android and Apple iOS
• Email Clients – Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook

With such high adoption of this setting, we need to ensure our email communications are readable, on-brand and error-free. Basically, we need to ensure we’re meeting user needs in their own context, in the right place, at the right time. So, we decided to look into it.

What are the challenges in fixing dark mode setting?

There are a few key challenges in implementing dark mode. These are:

• each email client and the operating system will render emails differently.
• even the age of the device can cause a problem.

To combat it, the best way to test and check emails, is through an email optimisation tool, like . This resource performs tests on over 70 email clients, including dark mode simulations.

An email may look great with the dark mode setting turned off, but tests using Litmus indicate that elements of the University email template are affected in dark mode.

Caption: The difference between dark mode on and off, colours invert

The image above details two screens with the dark mode off and on. The screen on the left displays the email with the dark mode setting turned off. The screen on the right depicts the same email in dark mode. Here key brand colours are inverted, causing the email to be displayed incorrectly.

Our university is not alone, brands are affected too. Logos, text and call-to-action buttons seem to disappear. This isn’t the outcome any brands wish for when the purpose of an email is to engage with our customers, community and so on.

So, what do we do? Develop a plan for success

Caption: A process improvement plan setting direction of work

Before any work is undertaken, we developed a process improvement plan to:

• outline the purpose of the work,
• set direction, and
• break the workload into smaller, more manageable stages.

First, we need to recognise the main issues, understand their impact, and identify who could be affected.

Who is our audience and what mail platforms and devices do they use?

Our standard email template is at the heart of our digital communications. We use the template to build engaging emails to prospective students, to communicate with enrolled students and staff as well as other groups such as our alumni community. Each audience interacts with emails differently.

It is important to understand which email client, and platform our target audience uses. Otherwise, we could focus on the wrong technology.

Caption: The University’s main target audiences and how they interact with emails

When analysing our target audience, we identified three email clients (Apple Mail, Gmail, and Outlook). Whilst younger recipients prefer mobile devices, staff and alumni prefer a mixture of mobile and desktop.

Pinpoint the crucial issues

To determine the source of the problem, we carried out extensive testing using Litmus to identify the problem.

Inconsistencies between email clients and operating systems provide different results in dark mode. Most notably colours render differently. Whilst most images are unaffected, Gmail inverts smaller images such as small social media logos.

The diagram below details which operating system and email client combinations experience problems.

Caption: The results from extensive testing to identify which email clients and operating systems experience a problem in dark mode

What is the biggest problem?

The dark mode function inverts colours. All colours coded in the email can be affected. Colours of banners, call-to-action buttons, and hyperlinks, shift in colour.

Like all brands, the University provides a range of colours to create a visual impact and to distinguish the brand. But would these colours be affected by the dark mode colour shift?

The answer is yes. The chart below depicts what happens to our brand colours in dark mode and across several email clients. The result looks like a piece of modern art.

Caption: This may look like modern art, but is the colour shift of our brand colours in dark mode

Where the brand colour Marine 1 is utilised in our campaign emails, the colour will become lighter in dark mode. Whilst the lighter Marine 2 will become darker. This colour shift will affect the effectiveness of any button or hyperlink.

The challenge is to choose colours less affected by the colour shift for each part of our email template. With the help of Steve Wise, another member of the Digital User Experience team, we reviewed the test results to identify how to resolve the issues.

Redesign of the email template

Our testing identified that simpler email template designs are the best for replication in dark mode. The areas of improvement included:

• simplify the template design,
• ensure template is accessible and renders through all email clients,
• remove background colour in content blocks,
• introduce a single image replacing the header banner and logo,
• simplified footer,
• develop different social media icons

Creating the code to target dark mode

The coding has been a challenge. Not all email clients work the same way. Each element needs specific code for each email client and operating system.

Using the Litmus system, each piece of code was tested. Some worked, most did not. We conducted a total of 3,000 email simulations before we created a stable working template.

We developed separate code to create the email style, CSS, to target specific operating systems and email clients:

@media (prefers-color-scheme:dark) controls elements for Apple Mail and iOS.

[data-ogsc] controls elements for Android and Outlook.

Specific code targeting Microsoft Outlook, ensures text inverts correctly and is readable on a dark background. Without this inclusion, Outlook may not invert text correctly.

The key with any development is to ensure that the email looks and renders the same through all email clients.

Caption: The new University email template renders correctly in dark mode, thanks to some extra code

Hyperlinks and accessibility

Hyperlinks provide a link to external content and are identifiable by underlined text. This underline can cause readability issues as it cuts through any text with a dropped tail (g, j, p, q, and y).

Through code, we can remove the underline and replace it with a padded borderline below the text.

During testing, we found that Outlook removes this border and would need more code to insert the underline to hyperlink text. More code is not better.

The decision here is to retain the standard underline to hyperlinks. It works through all email clients and is a simple solution.

Implementation

The email template will be used in a broad range of CRM applications (Microsoft Dynamics, Connect, Mailchimp), each requiring separate templates. Depending upon the system, we will implement new code to allow the template to function correctly in the CRM system.

In Summary

We are pleased with the progress to redevelop our template, to better address the challenges of dark mode compatibility.

We’re looking forward to seeing how our users will respond to the new template as we start to integrate it into our upcoming campaigns and wider communication.

Many thanks to all my contributors: Doug, Steve, Ayala and Jonny.

Links to articles and further resources:

• by 99Content *
• by Night Eye **
• by Litmus
• by Business of Apps

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

Hey. I’m Ayala and I’m a self-confessed optimist: I generally think that everything will work out just fine if you work hard and take calculated risks every now and again.

Those who know me well will tell you that conformity and patience have never been my greatest strengths.

I was brought up on a : a collective community where, from a very young age, we were expected to be independent, self organise and contribute to the broader community needs (people over profit). It was safe and everyone played by the same rules. But it was also a real mixture of dynamics between collectivism and individualism, which created what I would call ‘positive tensions’. This idea has stayed with me and I still believe that the power of the group – harnessed properly – is awesome, and that doing so requires embracing short-term pain in favour of longer-term gains.

Image: ‘kibbutz life’ collective celebration. Source: Kibbutz archives

Collective vs self interest

This post is not about me, or the story of my life. It’s actually about ‘governance’ and how to make short-term changes stick and endure the stress test of real life. These are big ideas, and often big ideas make big organisations nervous. So to make lasting change requires quite a lot of optimism combined with more than a pinch of realism! Governance also requires us to get to the ‘sweet spot’ of the overarching power of the collective balanced with the proactive need of the individual.

For the past two years, I’ve been the Business Owner of OneWeb, a large-scale digital transformation programme at the University of Southampton. Working with many different functions and colleagues, I’ve noticed some strong parallels and that’s what ‘re-triggered’ some of this thinking.

So, after all of the hard work we’ve put in, and as we look to both conclude and look towards the future benefits of completing our ambitious programme, I wanted to share a few thoughts and learnings.

1# Governance isn’t a dirty word (but can be seen as evil)

. And they normally fail for pretty consistent reasons. I’ve spoken a lot about the messiness of change and the messiness of humans, and my experience to date has confirmed what a difficult thing transformation within large organisations is to achieve.

The problem is that the word ‘governance’ is often mistaken for meaning ‘restrictions’: putting limitations in the way of individual needs and creativity. The power of the collective is much stronger than the individual, and in the context of a university (or any large, complex organisation), this often leads to some prioritisation of the ‘centre’ over the ‘individual’ (aka faculties, schools, academics).

Anyway, you get the idea. While individuals are mainly on board with everything you’re proposing, collectively, the narrative is such that people in the organisation dislike, even hate, any idea that this may mean they have to conform to the centre. On the other hand, governance (done well) is a force for good for everyone: the group, the organisation and the individual.

#2 Maintaining is as important as building

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.” – , Hocus Pocus.

I agree with Kurt. Governance is essential when you form digital services and it’s through ongoing maintenance and development that you capitalise on big investment.

When creating new and improved services for users, many organisations often don’t delve deep enough into the internal efforts within the collective that delivers that service. This is risky because it can bring a lot of confusion and uncertainty about ownership and responsibilities, funding models and other critical elements such as standards and ways of working. Standards, of course, help with re-use and maintenance.

When OneWeb got approved in 2019 we were adamant that we didn’t want to limit ourselves to just improvements that lie directly in the user interface. The mandate was to create a real change – create services and products that meet user needs – that would last beyond a facelift. Not just re-skinning, and legitimising new visuals, but doing it properly and getting to the root of the issues. This meant sorting out governance issues so we never have to do expensive ‘facelifts’ ever again.

That’s of course easier said than done. Service design, user research and journey mapping have all helped us to understand the bigger picture better since we’ve started. We collaborated with external users and our colleagues internally to understand what all services’ layers and interfaces are made of. We knew that we had to start somewhere, and the website was an obvious place to focus our initial change, but with all this work came a catch-22 scenario. We know that our users want a single, integrated experience. They are not interested in learning how to carefully navigate our various channels and systems just to understand what’s going on inside our organisation and their place within it.

So the questions become:

• how do we get our stakeholders to recognise that building new, shiny things is often (wrongly) prioritised over maintenance and re-use?
• how do we get others to recognise that the world is littered with ?
• how do we address governance in a way that benefits the organisation (i.e. not reverting back to type, allowing us to achieve outcomes that we never imagined before)?
• how do we make the processes and standards really clear whilst preserving a sense of creativity and individualism at the same time?

These are big questions – ones I am seeking to answer.

#3 There needs to be a big ‘G’ in Governance

Back to Kibbutz life.

Life in the community is unlike anything I’ve experienced before or since. There’s little privacy, the sheer number of people coming and going is difficult to adapt to, and having company at all times forces you to regularly confront your personal flaws. Communal often means secure, it means creative, it means diverse, it means open to debate. It also means new, diverse connections, which is one of the biggest challenges of governance – collaborating with others.

My point is – to do a proper job of digital services, and to manage the user experience properly, and to stop buying things we do not need, governance must underpin all the following service layers:

• user interface
• collaboration within the organisation
• nasty IT / legacy stuff
• data and information design

Governance is also a major enabler for digital.

We should all learn from past experiences. Organisations tend to do what’s easiest for a particular department, faculty, or even a manager. I know it sounds harsh, but how do we stop and ask ourselves:

• who is accountable for good or bad design?
• who is accountable for good / bad information?
• who is accountable for the impact it creates for the user?

Good governance should be supportive.

If you haven’t thought of it properly you will have a challenge on your hands. A focus on services is now more important than ever because they’re our engines: for data, for design, for systems. And governance is a major enabler for digital as well as communities of practice to flourish because good ‘big governance’ should be the glue that enables small-scale flexibility and excellence..

#4 Unless culture changes, we will be running uphill with one arm tied behind our backs

Culture is always an interesting component and I have difficulty describing it. As per :

“… you can’t change the culture by diktat, it’s a function of the experience of the people. If you want to change the culture you have to change the experience of those people.”

So unless we make some fundamental changes in how we come together, communicate and organise ourselves, we will continue to feel as if we’re running uphill with one (or two) arms tied behind our back. And damn – that makes things harder than they should be!

Image: Most organisations were never designed (for the internet), Source:

Kibbutz life offered stability, identity, community, belonging, a world view that previous generations to mine had lost. My kibbutz was a powerhouse when it came to agriculture and technology in its very heyday. People were ambitious together. But it failed to anticipate a ‘second day’ revolution, in which many among my generation sought new adventures elsewhere. It also failed to anticipate the messiness human beings desire, and how it can, in a closed, family-like system, produce uniquely poisonous variants of hurt and betrayal. Collective memory (or as I call it ‘the broken hearts club’) can lead to a long period of collective soul-searching and problem solving running up hill…

Can you see the parallels, or have I digressed?

But there are some strong lessons here for governance.

My kibbutz did eventually turn itself around: from a close and rigid, risk-averse culture to a dramatically more diverse and inclusive culture with a lot more freedom for people to operate within the community’s parameters (framework), where everybody shares spaces, communal social and cultural life, and major decisions…

So a few more thoughts on how we could potentially overcome some challenges, some heavily influenced by speaking with my team members as well as , which I will attempt to summarise below.

Not channels, services:

We don’t solve users’ problems by building a thing and sticking it on a website. Fast forward a few years, and the complaints about the website from everyone in the organisation will become unbearable:

• nobody can find their way around the website
• student-facing services are bogged down with questions from confused students
• product owners are frustrated with users who can’t make sense of their services or products

Then finally, someone decides that something has to be done. We really need to change the conversation. We should be talking about journeys and experiences for users, which make up a service.

With my team, we sometimes talk about and organise ourselves around areas like ‘courses’ or ‘education’. But really what we’re talking about is ‘Becoming an undergraduate student’, or ‘finding people and expertise’. These are all services. If we look at it end-to-end it includes multiple touchpoints, both digital and physical, some of which start long before people are aware of us.

Action:

• we need to define what a ‘service’ is at UoS and look at them end-to-end.

Image: Good services are designed.��Credit:

Organise ourselves around services:

Not at all easy to do in large complex organisations with plenty of egos, but if we set up teams and jobs around services, this affects interaction with stakeholders as well as team dynamics. The risk is that if you ignore it, you’re creating silos and disjointed experiences.

Take for example data design – by building data infrastructure that ignores the drivers that shape the environments in which the infrastructure is deployed and built, this will ultimately result in brittle infrastructure. Funding choices shape the type of infrastructure we get.

Funding choices > poor infrastructure + poor data design = poor user experience = (poor services).

Action:

• to align ourselves to services with some joined KPIs and not some lower level / vanity metrics.
• to get under the skin of our corporate strategy so we can create a funding model that can support a future digital infrastructure (with designers, technologists and information builders).

Cut across in another way:

However teams organise, there’s always a tendency to work in silos. Cutting across departments helps to build more collaborative functions into job roles e.g. lead roles that look across a set of services for certain types of users. Design crits and similar meetings also help to expose what teams are working on and build consistency of approach.

Action:

• to change structure, and processes to align against a service model.
• to look at artefacts, such as common journeys, data standards, architecture, diagrams, design and content patterns, dashboards to ensure everyone has a shared understanding.

#5 Conclusions: world of imperfection

We buy systems instead of processes, capabilities and skills. The bottom line is that services have evolved and now behave in a way that just about makes ends meet. They’ve evolved to work in a particular way, but now they’ve reached such a point where everything is frozen in time.

This is because when people (customers) keep paying for the service, it’s hard to make the case for change. And few people are incentivised to make the case for change because livelihoods depend on everything staying just the way it is.

But our customers don’t ask for backend process improvements. They don’t ask for efficient devOps, or design systems, or product teams. They want what those things enable, but they are not going to mandate how we do what we do.

The hardest challenge is to sometimes accept that companies and organisations often do what is worst for them. We must persevere and keep showing that there is huge value in improving skills and processes, in focusing on quality, not quantity.

What we started as part of OneWeb lets our organisation deliver on these benefits. We haven’t arrived in my utopian state – for that, we also need good governance.

The double-irony is that everything I’ve mentioned – improving processes, standards etc. – also helps the ‘sexy’ stuff with AI and dashboards that management is keen on and might even pay for (but might not actually need to).

And no system on its own can do anything useful. Data and information quality is one of the huge challenges today; a tremendously complex problem that requires highly skilled people and well designed systems. But so few organisations want to invest in the skills and think big. And decision-making around what our teams (and others) are making has to be cut and clear.

Image: Leading transformational change. Source:

Everyone in the teams needs to understand where we’re heading, and people outside the teams need to know our strategy so they can see how it helps the University and how they can help if they have the information we need.

Bringing it back the full-circle: let’s understand what we’re doing and what is the role of governance in the creation of services, and how we’re going to do it consistently. If we can reach a state of ‘positive tension’ – where seemingly conflicting views unite under the banner of good governance – then individuals can decide if they are going to collaborate, or leave the pack. Just like in a collective.

At the end of the day, we all live in a large globalised digital kibbutz and our survival depends on our communal skills, not just trust in our leaders.

Intent matters: it’s not what you believe in – it’s what you do. Source: Kibbutz archives��

Thank you for reading my post to the end. We’re looking at developing our governance approach and principles, so please come back in 2021 to check on our progress and updates.

My immense thanks to Mark, Jonny, Kate, Andy, Dan for their thoughts, contribution and suggestions. Thoughts and comments are always welcome, especially If you have managed to make short-term changes stick, I would love to hear from you.

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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.

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):