It was a busy day, with typical festival weather (wet!), and sessions held at both Highfield and Avenue campuses featuring talks on a number of topics, including:

• User needs
• Content-first transformation
• Usability testing
• User research
• Social media listening and guiding principles
• Agile practices

Caption: ‘So there is a beer tent’ credit: Ed Fay

Thank you

We’d like to thank , , , and for their enormous spirit, honesty, and inspiration during the sessions. Big thanks must also go to the Digital Team, who organised the event and helped ensure proceedings went smoothly (even when fire alarms were going off and evacuations were required!).

For our colleagues and students who managed to attend, thank you for your great questions and input into the sessions. Your collaboration is fundamental to the OneWeb Project and we look forward to continuing these conversations with you in the weeks and months ahead.

For those of you couldn’t make it, you can check out the hashtag on Twitter and LinkedIn for posts about the event. We have also included below a recap of each session, with slides and key learnings.

To find out what each session covered, what we learned and to access the session slides, scroll down the page or use the links below.

Keynote – Speaking with one voice: Creating great content in large organisations

Agile 101

User Needs 101

Are you listening? Are you really listening?

How organisations can learn about their users in an agile environment

Keynote – Speaking with one voice: Creating great content in large organisations

Padma Gillen – Lead Consultant on the OneWeb Project, Llibertat

Welcome and introduction by Ian Dunn, COO

Credit: Stephanie Rabasa, Twitter:

Padma’s keynote introduced the challenges and solutions for large organisations when it comes to publishing quality content on the web, which goes far beyond having good writers and great content teams.

What we learned

• Agile is low risk and the most efficient way to do digital projects, and it prioritises user needs and delivering over reporting and following a plan to the letter
• structured content is planned, developed, etc., outside of any interface, so that it can be used by any interface. It’s an efficient way for doing content.
• the governance model should separate the ownership of the facts (distributed) and the ownership of the user experience (central). You must have good processes in place.

View the slides here

Agile 101

Mark Wyatt – OneWeb Programme Manager

Mark’s sessions focussed on what agile is, what it isn’t and how we will be using it as part of the OneWeb project.

Mark shared the five phases of an agile project (discovery, alpha, beta, live and retirement), what product backlogs, sprint backlogs and sprints are; and also shared a case study from the Environment Agency of outcomes and results of using an agile approach to their digital transformation project.

What we learned

• Agile is a methodology that is adaptive, emphasises collaboration, flexible, and encourages continuous improvement and high quality outcomes.
• Agile is not a marathon, but a series of sprints
• It will allow us to work openly and in a transparent way

View the slides here

User Needs 101

Katrina Dixon – OneWeb Content Strategist

In the User Needs 101 sessions, Katrina showed us how to create great content that works by starting with what our users need, and how this approach will work in the OneWeb project.

Thank you to everyone for your cooperation and understanding when fire alarms went off at the beginning of the morning session and delayed the start!

What we learned

• ‘User needs’ are the needs that a user has of a service, and which that service must satisfy for the user to get the right outcome for them. It’s been applied to many online services and products, including the award winning GOV.UK.
• The whole process should start with what and why. You should find out why the user wants to do something, and if there are better ways to solve that root problem
• Most of the time, we start with the solution, not the problem. Instead, the focus should be on the problem. User stories can help.

View the slides here

Are you listening? Are you really listening?

Rob Armstrong-Haworth – Higher Education Account Executive for Hootsuite, with Jonny Vaughan

Credit: Jonny Vaughan, Twitter:

Rob and Jonny showed us how using social media listening benefits student recruitment, staff engagement and student experience and that it’s time for universities to stop using social media as a megaphone – shouting messages out to applicants, students, and staff in a one-sided fashion.

What we learned

• “Vanity metrics”, while easy to measure, do not offer valuable insights into how your social activity is performing or whether you are meeting your objectives
• Good social listening doesn’t have to be complicated – it’s a question of looking for the right voices in the right places
• Social media is a two-way conversation – feedback from your audience comes in many forms, and should inform everything from your overarching social media strategy to how you create your content

View the slides here

Resources

• to get your copy of the UoS Social Media Handbook, as well as other useful tools
• Did you know we have a dedicated Slack forum for discussing all things social media at the University? .

How organisations can learn about their users in an agile environment

Lee Duddell – UX Director for UserZoom, with Chris Lockhart

Credit: Linden McKenzie, Twitter:

, talked about ‘How organisations can learn about their users in an Agile environment. Chris Lockhart, our Web Content Lead joined the conversations to give some extra context from our own website.

What we learned

• Enemies of UX  – HIPPOs! (Highest Paid Persons Opinions), and how this can block and destroy good UX.
• What is good UX and what is bad UX research, e.g. just because you ask the user about their experience doesn’t mean you’re automatically adding value or improving it, you may even be making it worse by asking them a really long list of questions. They used a really good example of some live online surveys where the questions don’t really mean anything and one (Homebase) which had over 27 questions.
• Test, and test again – this talk really showed how easy it is to test and evidence your work and it’s ok to test again if what you thought doesn’t work out, it is part of the agile process to keep improving to get it right for the user and being able to evidence this and always bring it back to the data.

View the slides here

Summary

Credit: Ayala Gordon, Twitter:

It’s been a busy first festival. We had a wonderful time and once again, massive thanks to everyone involved. Have a look at if you missed the day, or if you need some light entertainment.

We hope to see you all again for the next OneWeb fest!

Links to all sessions below.

For one day only, and to mark the University’s commitment to OneWeb, the University’s digital team will be hosting the first university-led event of its kind in the sector. Our impressive line-up of speakers will include some of the UK’s stars of content strategy and design as well as user experience.   

Join us to celebrate the launch of OneWeb.

What we’re planning

Building on the vision and change the OneWeb project demands, we understand the importance of face-to-face conversations that allow for depth, collaboration, and a greater sense of trust.

The OneWeb festival will be free to all our colleagues and students to attend and will take place for one day only. We hope that as many of you from across the University, can join us for some or all of the sessions.

The day will be split into different sessions including talks, workshops and discussions. This format will allow our community to create connections, engage in dialogue and facilitate further cooperation.

You’ll be able to exchange ideas and approaches on topics including

• User needs
• Content-first transformation
• Usability testing
• User research
• Social media and guiding principles
• Agile practices

The Festival will also help you put our team’s names to faces and learn best practice in various digital disciplines. It will help us to continuously improve our services and digital products.

The line up

Padma is the author of and is the lead consultant on the OneWeb project. Padma runs a content design consultancy called Llibertat, following many notable successes as Head of Content Design at the Government Digital Service (GDS). He uses his expertise in content design management and agile content production to help organisations create quality content and maximise the effectiveness of their content teams.

Padma advises organisations on how to set up and deliver successful web content projects, coaches them through the process, and provides content design teams to make it happen.

Padma will deliver a keynote about “Speaking with one voice: Creating great content in large organisations”.

, Hootsuite

Rob is the higher education lead for in the UK and Ireland. With 17 years experience of working in higher education (at four universities), his focus is now on helping institutions succeed with social.

Titled “Are You Listening? Are You Really Listening?”, Rob will present a thought provoking talk about the power of social listening and how it can enhance a university’s ability to improve social experience. He will be joined by our Social Media Lead, Jonny Vaughan, to give more context from the day-to-day work on Southampton’s central channels and some useful best practice advice.

, UX Director, UserZoom

Lee’s been working in remote research for longer than most (as far back as 2008 AD when he founded WhatUsersDo). Lee is passionate about putting UX insight at the heart of decisions, so it’s just as well his focus at is to help brands become customer focused by making research Business as usual (BAU).

Lee will be giving a talk about ‘How organisations can learn about their users in an Agile environment’ and will be joined by our very own Content Team Lead, Chris Lockhart, featuring some tangible examples from our current website.

Katrina Dixon, OneWeb Content Strategist 

Katrina is the Content Strategist for the OneWeb project. She has worked as a Senior Content Designer and Content Strategist on projects including GOV.UK, Barnardo’s and UCL. She creates and improves content and end-to-end user journeys that are simpler, clearer and faster by basing everything on what the user needs.

In User Needs 101 Katrina will show you how to create great content that works by starting with what your users need, and how this approach will work in the OneWeb project.

Mark Wyatt, OneWeb Programme Manager

Mark is the Programme Manager for the OneWeb project.  His previous role to this was Head of Content at Defra. Mark has managed the delivery of several large content transformation projects for government, including Defra’s Smarter Guidance project. He has also worked on establishing a User Centred Design function and embedding end-to-end service delivery within the organisation.

Mark works with agile project management techniques, delivering content transformation at scale and pace, as well as building team capability and business processes to enable ongoing benefits and improvements.

In ‘Agile 101’ Mark will look at what agile is, what it isn’t, and how we’ll be using it as part of the OneWeb project.

How to attend

If you are interested in the OneWeb project, and would like to learn more about usability testing, content transformation, agile practices, user needs and social media, please book your space for each session below. 

Links to sessions (all in Highfield Campus, unless otherwise stated):

Morning sessions:

• 09:30am – Keynote – Padma Gillen, 
• 10.00am – Katrina Dixon –
• 11.00am – Mark Wyatt –

Afternoon sessions:

• 12.00pm – Rob Armstrong-Haworth, with Jonny Vaughan, , Avenue Campus
• 1.00pm – Lee Duddell, UserZoom, with Chris Lockhart, 
• 1.00pm – Mark Wyatt,
• 1.30pm – Katrina Dixon, , Avenue Campus
• 2.00pm – Keynote – Padma Gillen, 
• 2.00pm –  Lee Duddell, UserZoom, with Chris Lockhart, 
• 2.00pm – Rob Armstrong-Haworth, with Jonny Vaughan, 

Don’t forget to sign up for more information by subscribing to our .

If you are unable to attend the sessions, we will be blogging about it and are looking into the options of recording the main sessions.

Please share it with colleagues who might not have an instant access to computers and emails.