Digital professionals have always sought to influence the critical decisions that shape services and products in their organisations, but that influence feels considerably less palpable in the face of today’s challenges.

Change is coming

The midway point of the year is a good time to step back and look at the evolving landscape of higher education (and the unknown beyond the horizon) with a pragmatic view.

Andrew Greenway’s important blog post from September 2024: has been on my mind for the past few months. And there was the start of the academic year, with rippling throughout the sector and .

There is an overwhelming sense that more is yet to come and the rate of change demands a response. The crucial question for Higher Ed digital professionals isn’t just how to embrace it, but whether our current approaches are enough to make a meaningful impact. , it’s clear there are many good examples of best practice in the sector. These efforts consistently yield useful outcomes, but they are predominantly directed at small-scale, non-holistic improvement.

I agree that it’s important to start somewhere, but is this this really enough to affect the kind of change Andrew referred to?

I’m reminded of a recent conversation with , on the question of whether higher education institutions are even capable of frequent, incremental change. Does digital transformation in our sector instead require a ‘juggernaut’ event? One large, unstoppable effort that forces change through sheer momentum.

While conventional wisdom favours the incremental approach, our experiences with programmes like OneWeb challenge its applicability, especially given the unique operational realities of universities.

Operational realities

Universities are like connected tissues

Universities are complex organisms. To affect one thing, you need to understand all the other moving parts. This is particularly true for institutions that strive to balance their teaching, research, and business activities.

Developing digital solutions for individual departments is (relatively) manageable. The complexity emerges when a university attempts to unify these elements within a single digital framework.

That framework has to align with teaching, research, and business operations (the ‘holy trinity’), accommodate their interconnected needs and conflicts, and support the intricate network of information that flows between each area.

Navigating the institutional labyrinth

Navigating the traditional hierarchies and siloed departments of higher education is an unenviable challenge. Digital professionals are (necessarily) adept at stakeholder engagement, but these efforts are impeded by organisational structures that prevent clear communication and efficiencies.

Planning for the tangible, like costs and milestones, is one thing. Navigating the complex web of stakeholder interests, motivations, and emotions that shape transformative decisions is quite another.

Faced with so much complexity, is it more effective to pursue a bold, comprehensive transformation in a key area (as with our OneWeb programme)? Or should we opt for smaller, self-contained initiatives, even if they lack depth of research and development?

Iterative transformation

The default for many, including ourselves in the past, has been incremental. Agile methodology focuses on iterative change, typically starting with a minimal viable product (MVP) and building from there with clear intent to deliver a product that meets user needs directly according to their feedback.

Changes are driven by users, allowing for designs that better address pain points.

This approach relies on cross-functional teams and frequent iteration to deliver value. When successful, it ensures the business delivers the right thing for its customers, with problems resolved much sooner than with a single grand launch.

The University never sleeps

Mark and I used to frame the ever-changing operational challenges and demands at Southampton as: ‘the University never sleeps’. Everything, everywhere, is a top priority – all the time.

Agile and iterative approaches cannot fix issues with prioritisation, but they have allowed us to respond quickly to changing needs – a flexibility that proved crucial during the pandemic. These practices reduce risk by reducing work into smaller phases, which allow for quicker course correction in unpredictable times.

But it isn’t without its drawbacks.

While incremental change is arguably safer and more flexible, the overall pace can feel too slow to keep up with institutional needs and competing demands from multiple areas. How long can you keep the faith when small teams, equipped for small changes, are destined to serve on multiple fronts?

Resistance is futile

Digital transformation in higher education is no longer just a strategic advantage. It is a competitive necessity.

Institutions must leave their comfort zones and invest boldly in initiatives that disrupt the old ways of doing business, which could mean adopting new models, integrating advanced technologies, or partnering with external organisations to leapfrog the competition.

There’s always the risk of falling behind.

In many higher education institutions, transformation efforts falter due to organisational inertia: the reluctance to adopt new technologies or rethink established structures. This goes beyond addressing minor inefficiencies and speaks to a deeper issue: the current system may simply be too ineffective and unresponsive to fix. It needs to be transformed to meet both internal and external demands, and to adapt rapidly to ongoing changes.

Crucially, we must also acknowledge that transformative ideas have an expiration date. True periods of transformation – like political ideas – occur every 20-30 years before running their course. As highlights, we tend to fit what we see into our existing ideas. We are undeniably in one of these critical moments now, and there’s no telling where will settle.

Transformative periods can be catalysed when leaders recognise current systems are beyond simple repair, and embrace an era of profound change. This means clearly defining which ideas have expired and adopting a new, unified stance. Otherwise, we risk superficial reforms that lead back to square one, with no lasting impact.

Overcoming these barriers requires decisive investment and action. Each of these could be a blog post in its own right, but here they are as starting points:

Invest in a culture of continuous improvement

Foster trust and support staff through continuous investment in the maintenance and development of digital services, and the teams behind them. This addresses anxieties about autonomy and counters self-sabotaging behaviours.

Secure unwavering leadership commitment

Visible, accountable leadership plays a critical role in removing obstructions to progress. Without it, resistance is here to stay.

Mandate cross-functional collaboration

Break down silos by investing in interdisciplinary teams, improved communication channels, and even reshaping organisational structures for greater agility.

Re-engineer core business processes

Digital transformation is more than new tech. It demands a fundamental redesign of everything that underpins the technology: workflows, data flow, communications, and more. This requires service thinking far beyond IT.

Develop dedicated teams and expertise

Address skill gaps and resource limitations by funding and developing in-house digital capabilities, rather than treating these as a one-off expense.

Success here ultimately hinges on how well an organisation moves beyond merely managing resistance, and breaks through it entirely to achieve the transformative change our sector requires. This is fundamental in turning stalled efforts into impactful and lasting institutional evolution.

There’s a word for bold initiatives that launch successfully, but don’t stick the landing:

Any guesses?

Change is constant

Pioneering a large, ambitious programme like OneWeb was never going to be easy for us. From the outside, the project might have seemed to be about a new website, but in truth, it involved substantial, unglamorous work beneath the surface.

The scale, ambition, and disruptive nature of such an undertaking carried the potential for game-changing impact, albeit with risk. The lessons learned, though hard-won, will prove invaluable for our long-term digital vision and asset development… as long as we commit to it.

OneWeb may have had incremental aspects to it, but the project was grounded in a larger vision that aimed for evolution, not revolution. This was no small feat and replicating such an approach at scale (or even sustaining its existing benefits) remains challenging. The importance of maintaining digital services long after their initial launch cannot be overstated; it is fundamental to realising their strategic value.

Considering the current pressures, it’s notable that such comprehensive models haven’t been more widely adopted. Broader uptake would enable institutions to implement their own scaled versions more rapidly and cost-effectively. While many players are becoming active in this space, few have undertaken the complete end-to-end journey and gained the associated deep learning.

This brings us back to the central question… and yes, for today’s higher education sector, the ‘juggernaut’ approach may be the most appropriate.

For digital practitioners, this means maintaining a big-picture perspective while you capitalise on the smaller wins.

Taking bold steps, backed by real investment, is key. This isn’t just about overcoming barriers, it’s about accelerating transformation to ensure lasting success, helping our institutions become more adaptable, innovative, and ready for what lies ahead. Many of the ideas that served us well have now expired, and the first step is to move past denial.

Perhaps the most exciting opportunity, our collective North Star, is to expand on the excellent work already done. Leveraging the user-led systems, services, and assets we’ve created to date will help us de-risk further investment, and build more extensively on established foundations.

Here’s to building that future, together.

My sincere thanks to Jonny for his contribution and suggestions.

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 there’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.

.

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.

Defining accessibility

The word ‘accessibility’ gets used a lot. Since 23 September 2019 the law around website accessibility has changed for public sector organisations.

As a university, we’re lucky to have some very dedicated expert colleagues in different parts of the organisation. They range from world-leading researchers to service providers, and dedicated digital and user experience practitioners. We’re also lucky to have access to students and other users, including disabled students and other advocates. They all work very hard to push the accessibility and inclusivity as high as possible on the University’s agenda. I’m always grateful to be working at a place that values and tries to do the right thing by the user.��

Over a number of years, I have had lots of conversations about accessibility. One observation that I’ve had is that people often have very different lenses on the topic and what ‘good’ means. That in itself can occasionally make having effective conversations and agreeing on shared definitions difficult.

The digital services definition

I’ve been looking at a lot of different definitions, tested accessibility design patterns and . Often, the word ‘accessibility’ gets used to describe how many people can use something.

defines ‘accessibility’ as “more than putting things online. It means making your content and design clear and simple enough so that most people can use it without needing to adapt it, while supporting those who do need to adapt things”.

I like Good Services design principles, especially number #11: a good service is usable by everyone, equally. “The service must be used by everyone who needs to use it, regardless of their circumstances or abilities. No one should be able to use the service less than anyone else” (, Lou Downe). Lou makes a case for designing for inclusion, and this goes beyond accessibility.

Inclusion is a necessity, not an enhancement poster. Lou Downe, .

Her point also helps set the scene a little for why it has been tricky for us as a programme, and for many other organisations, to be clear on what actually ‘gold’ (beyond the required minimum) accessibility standards are for our University.

So why is it so challenging? Here’s my non-exhaustive list:

Challenge 1: there’s no A to Z guide for applying accessibility

The OneWeb programme was set up specifically to re-engineer digital services and products for our many end-users. Essentially the brief is to design every service around user needs. Accessibility can obviously affect the needs of every group we design for so ‘baking in accessibility’ has always been one of the guiding principles of the programme.��

If the goal is to meet users’ needs, then surely we must try to make our services as inclusive as possible. We’re doing this by ensuring there are no�� barriers that make it impossible or difficult for anyone to use them. We want our services to be easy to use by everyone.��

This isn’t always simple though.��

Stakeholders and end-users often have conflicting requirements and there will be situations that are overlooked due to us being unaware of them.

So it is important to understand why someone might be more likely to be excluded from our service and tackle the underlying causes for it. For example, providing an alternative way of contacting us, or ensuring we represent diversity in our imagery.��

In reality though when deadlines are short, budget is limited, there are legacy systems at play, and other challenges to work with – compromises do happen. This is not something that I think we should accept lightly, but I’m being honest about it.��

Also as we’ve already established, inclusivity goes way beyond digital services. We need to consider other touch-points in the journey including when individuals may have a temporary or a permanent access issue. It goes all the way to physical access in buildings to HR policies.

Microsoft Design Toolkit: Examples of permanent, temporary or situational impairment via ��

This is one of many reasons why diversity in teams and organisations is important. It’s why we must conduct regular user research with our audiences and test with as many users as possible to make sure our services truly work for everyone. It does beg the question – how much can you polish stuff that hasn’t been built with users in mind, let alone accessibility and inclusivity in mind?��

This cannot be an after-thought. It has to be ‘baked-in’ right from the start to make sure our services are:����

• useful
• usable��
• desirable��
• accessible��
• credible��
• findable��
• valuable��
• and inclusive

“Inclusion is like making blueberry muffins – it’s a lot easier to put the blueberries in at the start than in the end.” Cordelia McGee-Tubb ( ) in Good Services, Lou Downe.

So really, good accessibility design – is just good human-centred design. It is about accommodating 100% of your potential users.��

“We treat disabled people as if they are different but that isn’t the case, as digital accessibility affects all of us. If nothing else, you should see it in a selfish way, as one day you will probably need this type of accessibility.” .

Challenge 2: evolving guidelines

Given that we design digital services, we refer to the (the body that produces many of the standards that the web relies on) . There are three conformance levels:��

• A,��
• AA,��
• AAA

‘A’ is the minimum level of accessibility. We aim as a minimum for AA level as a public sector institution.

Achieving ‘one best way’ for compliance with WCAG 2.1 can be challenging, fraught with complexity and might result in lack of clarity, which is time consuming and can be expensive when the clock is ticking on your project. In reality there could be different interpretations of accessibility standards, which can create natural tension between experts, such as content designers, user researchers, developers, UX designers, product owners and executives.������

As far as I’m concerned, the standards were never intended to allow for multiple interpretations, but different interpretations serve different needs, and are not less or more valid than one another. As such, organisations should define the goals they are striving for, so that when designing, testing and auditing the work, everyone is working to the same interpretation. Easier said, than done – I know!������

In terms of OneWeb, and eventually when the programme moves to Business-As-Usual, all new features we’ve shipped over the past year have been designed and tested to meet WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines to ensure our products are accessible.

At the same time, we’ve gone back and retrofitted existing features and interactions for better accessibility on live products. Examples of it will be changes to content following content design best practice from the – a universal content style guide, based on usability evidence. Other examples will be in development and prototyping of specific features such as navigation, forms and other components.

Challenge 3: stakeholders and strategies

This is probably one of the most challenging parts of all. In a large, complex organisation like a university that is inherently fragmented by its devolved nature, it can be difficult to find the right voice that can guide us with ease to the right strategy and outcomes.��

The truth is that when accessibility is introduced as an organisation-wide practice, rather than just observed by a few people within specific teams, it will inevitably be more successful. If accessibility is the objective, inclusivity is surely the outcome. When everybody understands the importance of accessibility and the part they can play, we can make great (digital) services.

Accessibility is a right – not a privilege

We’re aiming high, so if we’re to be bold and try to achieve a gold standard (uncharted territory for us right now) as an organisation, we need to define it for all areas, not just web accessibility. For the practice to succeed it cannot be seen just as a line item in the budget. It’s an underlying practice that affects every aspect of the physical and online services as an institution.

Striving for an ideal approach is also not always about meeting organisational needs as this may require additional funding. Not because accessible services are more expensive. Simply because it requires teams to be developed and trained, and because we have to ensure our users can use the service in the way that best suits them. That sometimes means providing alternative materials like translations, or transcripts to benefit all users.��

And as standards evolve, what’s technically possible today, may be completely different in 12-months time (or even less) and therefore we should be thinking longer-term so we can optimise for advancements as they happen. For example, automated captioning for video has come a long way in the last 10 years.��

Being transparent

From speaking with the finest minds about accessibility within our organisation and beyond, we’re still busy ‘baking it in’.

As a team, we’re still chasing the ultimate view of gold standards that we’re defining with our university. In the next few weeks, we’re hoping to start sharing with other colleagues some of our learning, the assets we’re currently developing such as improved reusable components and pattern libraries, and best practice content design examples. However, it takes time and practice – from inclusive user research, to product development, testing, and expertise, to consistently work at this level.

One thing’s for sure – the importance of a defined and accepted strategy is the first part of addressing the challenge of how we’re going to define, develop and meet a gold standard in accessibility and inclusivity.������

������Ƭ Accessibility Awareness Day takes place on 21 May 2020. Thank you for reading.��

My thanks to , and Dr. Sarah Lewithwaite for their thoughts and suggestions on this post.

.

Resources we learn from:��

• from Content Design London
• by Lou Downe��
• ��
• ��
• GOV.UK��
• by Laura Kalbag��
• ��
• by Cordelia McGee-Tubb

Like… a lot.

On the main site alone, there are 90,000 pages, which are being constantly edited by more than 1,000 editors across the whole of the University.

90% of the site gets less than 1 page view per day. And that’s not including the content in 100s of marketing emails that get sent out to our prospective and current students, as well as all the other audiences. It also doesn’t include all the content that sits within our apps and other digital products and platforms.

And that content doesn’t come without its challenges.

So how do we tackle those challenges and find out what content our users actually care about? – Enter OneWeb

We need to change how we do things and this calls for digital transformation

“What’s the big deal?!” you might be thinking. Well, the way we do things has a huge effect on our reputation as a credible, high quality institution, which in turn affects how well we perform as an organisation. It’s also no longer fit for purpose to carry on behaving in the way we have, because our users have higher expectations than ever for how we serve them online. In a more progressive digital era, we have to change the way we do things – the times are calling for a digital transformation.

The data don’t lie.

Our analysis tells us that online channels and platforms are the prime places where users get in touch with us, find information they need from us and apply or register for various activities with us.

Okay, so what are we changing?

We are changing the way content is commissioned and written.

We’ll start focusing on the context behind the content – thinking about what, when, where and why we’re publishing it. To do this, we have put a new����to handle content requests and .

In the same vein, we are also making changes to how websites are being requested.

We will be using the same form for that. We’ll be looking to understand what the website is trying to achieve, how that aligns with our wider content strategy, and if another new website is the best approach. Perhaps another solution would be a better use of the resources.

Content creation is another key element.

We are using best practice Content Design methodology. It’s not just about writing in Plain English. It is about user research and creating smart content that gives our users what they need. And the way to do it is with data and user stories to guide our thinking, which we will then validate through user research, and iterate where appropriate.

Training on SitePublisher is also changing.

SitePublisher training will now be restricted. Initially this will be just for faculty and corporate sites, as we’re building new products directly related to our education content. We are communicating this to all editors.

New best practices

As part of the OneWeb journey, we’re also embedding new best practice principles. Our role, as the programme team, is to work with people across the University, encouraging co-creation and empowerment. We will be writing more about best practice as we roll out more elements of our work.

Getting ready

Getting ready for OneWeb

Our first priority as part of the OneWeb programme will be to develop the ‘Becoming an Undergraduate student’ journey, and the phase 1 Content Management System (CMS) to provide a new home for our content.

As part of our planning and ‘getting ready’ mode, we are working on:

• Creating a set of core user needs validated by research, data and key stakeholders, so we can build the essential content that prospective students need in order to complete tasks on the website. This includes:
  • categorising 90,000 relevant URLs and mapping them to identified user needs
  • identifying the source URLs for becoming an undergraduate
  • using comparative analytics and research, to identify the top user needs
• Recruiting external and internal resource to complete delivery of phase 1 of the OneWeb project
• Drafting training plans, organising training sessions and completing initial content design training for the OneWeb team
• CMS work
• Working out the workflow opportunities and challenges in a university environment for Agile ������Ƭy work
• Initial conversations with key stakeholders about potential archiving processes
• Strategy work around taxonomies, metatagging, and continuing iterations of workflows and governance

We will provide more details on all of these areas in the coming weeks.

Finally: people change, so our content needs to change with them. The iteration stage shouldn’t just come at the end. OneWeb marks a change in our approach. It will be a significant change, but implementing it doesn’t need to be complicated. It will take some time, but the improvements to our users’ experience of the University will be worth it.

Thank you all for your collaboration. As always, we’re keen to hear from you if you have any questions.

Ayala and the team

If you would like to understand more about this project and how it fits in with the wider OneWeb transformation, you can read my blog post: “We’re building better course pages, here’s how you can help”. ��

What were the goals of the course pilot?

In a world of frequent disruption, innovation and change, we are looking to the future of higher education and how the University can play a bigger role in this space, ��by developing digital products that fit with our values and strengths, but also by meeting the needs of our users. Specifically for this pilot phase, our aims were:

• Develop governance for course pages
• Encourage more prospective students to take the next step. For example: come to an open day, or apply for a course

OneWeb Mission Patches

Where are we now?

We just wrapped up the last 10 weeks of the project. We focused on:

• Research – understanding the landscape and gaining insights
• Initial proposition, design and development of our governance and workflow, and building and testing course page prototypes ��
• Understand users’ needs and gain a deeper understanding following the stakeholders’ workshops last November

What we did

The first two weeks were full of planning, gathering and understanding – coming to this project with a true open mind and as few assumptions as possible. We kicked off this project with Institutional Research (IR), we also spoke to FARs and their teams, and started on detailed research and recruiting participants.

In recruiting for our user research, we used the following criteria:

• Undergraduate applicants
• Predicted high achieving grades
• Specifically interested in our sample courses chosen for this pilot
• Have the predicted grades that these courses accept
• Domestic students

The testing was conducted remotely on desktops. There is another piece of research planned for mobile phones only. The three designs we tested were:

• AS IS – our current course pages

Politics and Spanish and Latin American Studies – current (As is) course page��

• HEFCE () – design based on the current , which is already based on solid research ����

– HEFCE course page��

• RAD – stands for Radical design – completely different than what we currently do and heavily utilises the persona work developed ��by IR on this specific audience. We wanted to forget the way it was always done and explore ideas for how else we could do it. We also wanted to introduce more input from current students and highlight how they can make a difference in the world with their degrees.��

– RAD course page��

We ended up recruiting very targeted prospective students. The initial questions were about understanding how they feel about the pages. Down the line we plan to do more specific usability tests to find out more about their actual needs and how effectively our course pages meet them.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the opportunities for governance, workflow and design, and how much digital can help alleviate some of the pains in the current system. Some insights we distilled were related to first impressions, formats, page structure, use of space and well-crafted content that goes beyond the information and transactional element of it.

Other learnings:

• You can never spend enough time with the people who are ultimately going to be using your product / services. There’s just no parallel to spending time with real users. ��
• There are problems that are never anticipated. Again, perceived need could be completely different from actual need.��
• The stakes are higher. Getting the course pages right from the outset and ticking all the boxes from a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), strategic, technical, brand, content structure and governance point of view will give our University a competitive advantage in an extremely crowded marketplace.

Things we didn’t have time to do

Our Alpha is finished for now. We are really hoping to take it to the next phase (Beta) and keep updating and improving a real product. There’s a bunch of things we would have liked to include in this Alpha version, but didn’t have time to. Here’s some things we’re thinking about doing next:

• More SEO research – ranking, keywords and content
• Mobile testing with our users
• Design iterations based on user feedback
• Usability testing
• Develop an information architecture based on findings from our card sort work
• User journey testing to offer additional level of detail with our RAD designs ��
• Amend governance workflow and retest
• Provide more instructions to colleagues who are Single Point of Contact (SPOCs) and Fact Checkers

Next Up

We are currently in the midst of developing our proposition further and we will keep you posted on this pilot and wider OneWeb developments. We are hoping to carry out more Show and Tells in the future, ��as well as completing some of our testing that is already in-flight, and some that requires more of a deep-dive research approach.

So ��for our findings from testing. In addition, if you missed our Show and Tells, you can access the��presentation slides here.

Side note:

We are sorry that due to technical difficulties with the audio, we are unable to share our Show and Tell recordings. If you have any questions, please get in touch.

Thank you for reading.

What we’ve done

Governance can be a hard sell, so this week I wanted to share some of the practical thinking about how we’ve experimented with the governance of our course pages.

Why do we need governance of course pages?

Course pages are complicated in terms of governance. There are a lot of fingers in the pie so to speak. We all tend our course pages in a different way and from speaking to our stakeholders, we all wish that we had clarity of roles and responsibilities.

Fingers in the pie. Source:

Believe it or not, governance can help us to:

• prioritise stuff so we can move much faster
• deliver the things we need to deliver
• Provide assurance that we’re achieving our objectives

What we’ve done:

This week, our Single Points of Contact (SPOCs) coordinated the course content that we had provided to them, within GatherContent workflow. Overall, more than half of the faculties’ SPOCs completed the workflow process with no major issues, and submitted the content for some further refinements. Shout out to Medicine and FEE who speeded through the workflow like nobody’s business.

Our templates in GatherContent post fact-check amends

We built a RAD

We also completed the technical build of our radical (RAD) design prototype where, on this occasion, the design is entirely content-driven. This is the first time that our developer and UX Designer was able to work on a content-first approach template.

There are many benefits for content-first approach, such as:

• websites are built around information, instead of just eye-catching designs and visuals
• it encourages organic traffic to the page through good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) linking because of the quality of the information
• much more beneficial for branding – the design only enhances and creatively displays the information about the brand, not the other way round
• it prevents back and forth, time-consuming corrections having to be made to the design, which is more costly
• it makes responsive design significantly easier to plan ahead and implement
• the process encourages unique and original design

One of our depth components – without giving too much away!

What we’ve learnt

Governance

• communication is the single biggest way to improve governance. People working in silos often don’t communicate effectively across silos. Containing everything in the one workflow programme is good, as everyone can see what has been going on
• as there is no institutional workflow, it was difficult for us and our SPOCs to identify whose responsibility it is to check what, and in what order. This is why it is really important that we truly have single points of contact i.e. the ability to liaise with one single person
• some of our SPOCs found it hard to know who to assign the bits of text to for checking, and also felt that marketing should be involved in this process: perhaps as an originator (pre-draft stage) or at the end of the process. We had many conversations about it this week and we agree with these comments. As a result, we are going to make a change to the workflow and put it forward as one of our recommendations.
• making it clear how to turn off the email alerts would be useful – not everyone needs to receive an alert after every comment is made. Perhaps this is a unique problem if there are two fact checkers.
• in some of the faculties, especially where there were more than two fact-checkers, there was lack of clarity over the roles and responsibilities.
• there were some inaccuracies in the existing course content currently live on our website, which we have now corrected

Thanks to all our SPOCs and fact-checkers

We want to put in a special thanks for all our SPOCs and fact-checkers for their diligent work and fast turnaround. And especially for getting involved and being a good sport, by dedicating time to help us out during a very busy time of year. Thank you all, we’re not taking it for granted. ��

What we’re doing next

Show and tell

Our for the University community will take place on Tuesday 3 July at Highfield Campus. Places are limited, and available on a first come, first served basis .

Build and design

We’re creating dummy pages to allow for user journeys and testing via our prototype website.��We’re also completing the final touches on all the remaining prototype sample pages so we can test them with users.

User research

Our sample has been verified and we’re gearing up for tests next week. We need to build many surveys in our testing platform and these will be administered online. ��We’re also carrying out card sort and tree tests on the navigation with our target audience in schools.

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend and thanks for reading.