We’re at the end of the OneWeb programme (but not the end of the University’s journey with user centred design), and I wanted to take a moment and recognise what an immense privilege it’s been working with all of you talented people. You are all worthy of this recognition – whether you have been:

• working directly on products and services,
• in a more supportive role as part of Business As Usual,
• seconded to join us,
• playing a specialist part as a contractor coming to work with us for a fixed amount of time.

The past 2.5 years were tough. Delivering a complex programme transparently and at pace, with many stakeholders across the University, was always going to be a significant challenge. What we hadn’t planned for was doing so remotely, in the midst of a global pandemic. It would have been reasonable to expect us to pause, de-scope or end the programme early to release costs. I’m keen for you to look back at what we’ve achieved despite the challenges we faced as part of this delivery.

I thought I’d use the time to reflect, and share something that only occurred to me in the past few weeks, because I’m still working through the closure activities for the programme, but also as a result of many conversations and discussion points I am having to make on behalf of our team so we can protect what we have achieved longer-term for the University.

Without honesty there is no progress

I consider myself lucky. I have worked with some really excellent managers, peers, and award-winning leaders over what I can define as a diverse career. Some of them have no idea how much they impacted me, I learned so much from each and every one of them.

Caption: OneWeb end of programme stickers ‘without honesty there is no progress.’

One thing definitely sticks – I grew up in a culture that encouraged openness and feedback and therefore I always sought constructive comments about my performance, and this is something I would encourage you all to do, wherever you end up working. It helped me with personal relationships and also at work. It’s not always pretty, or comfortable but hey – I know I am not perfect (forever a student, forever work in progress ;-))!

Imagine your employees are volunteering for you.

A few experiences from my early career have been haunting me recently. Maybe it’s because I am busy wrapping up a few things as part of the programme, but also because I had to say goodbye to a few very dear teammates recently, and a few others in the coming weeks.

I recall a specific situation when I was a proper junior and, despite being at the bottom of the pecking order, I was treated as a specialist with professional knowledge and expected to make decisions and collaborate with other departments based on the training I received. I am not saying that there was no hierarchy (there was), but we were trusted to make decisions and communicate and escalate accordingly. There was a process. Accountability was clear. There were clear expectations about deliverables. But the point I want to make is that I was treated like an employee who was volunteering for the work.

But how is this related to my team?

Let me get to the point.

We make choices every single day

As a manager, responsible for people’s livelihoods and well-being, I try to imagine you all as volunteers. I’m sure there were times where you felt my pressure and stress and I can think of some situations where (especially my direct reports) felt the effects of days full of long, but useful and challenging, conversations with senior executives.

I am sorry about that.

My motivation for leading you was beyond the usual digital transformation arguments of staying relevant and needing to adapt so the organisation is still a viable option in a crowded market. A key reason to embrace this work was to showcase the University as a ‘happening’ workplace that could attract talent, internally and externally. I wanted to demonstrate how adapting to change and demonstrating it, could bring in the right people. A melting pot of cognitive diversity. Because attracting talent gives organisations a competitive advantage. Full stop.

Any manager out there will be lying if at some point in their career they didn’t think their team can shoulder a burden because they are compensated handsomely, or it doesn’t matter if they don’t enjoy their job because they’re not going to leave anyway, or stuff like that.

But how does thinking of your team as volunteers, who have kindly donated their time to deliver your dream, affect how you treat them?

• more respect?
• more trust?
• more care?
• more enjoyment in your work?
• more skills development?

Right now I am responsible for a high-performing function. For any new digital culture to thrive and be adopted beyond the lifespan of a transformation programme (and no, I am not talking about the whole organisation getting Google level 2 certification is a digital transformation initiative), it is key to invest in building the capacity internally. I am grateful for all the ‘early adopters’ who took the time to speak with me, find out more about what we’re trying to do and for taking a leap of faith. I’m also very grateful to those who followed, and to those who showed an untapped talent and just needed a chance.

You are all doing some amazing things in the digital space – whether it is human-centred design, human-centred code, human-centred delivery. You’re a knockout team.
Every single day that you are turning down another offer and choosing to stay means a great deal and makes a massive difference.

Caption: As a OneWebber user story coasters

When I joined the team in 2017, we were a smaller group; we have grown significantly since then – in numbers, skills and confidence. We’re in demand within our organisation because we showed our value, but I am under no illusions that there is still a lot to do to carry our message in a vast and complicated place.

During OneWeb we had very little churn in fixed term and permanent positions, which is actually pretty unusual for a multi-years programme. I tried to give you interesting work in a supportive and compassionate environment. We didn’t avoid difficult conversations, I wasn’t always nice, but I hope you recognise that we got through some pretty tough stuff in a human way.

To the best of my ability, I have tried to keep communications with you all honest and transparent – only you can judge if it helped. We have faced unprecedented challenges in the last year and I hope, with all the difficulty this has caused, that you have always known we were facing them together. And I hope you’ve been able to see and recognise how much respect I have for you all.

Telling the truth can be hard

The focus of the work we’ve carried out as part of OneWeb carries a lot of weight, especially with the people who do not have a voice in the room – the actual people who use our services. Those that get confused in finding information, or see our own internal backend systems open to all! We have a responsibility to the wider community to use our voice, interact with users on a regular basis and represent this through debate, raising awareness and educating others. I hope, very much, that things only go from strength to strength – the need for our work is urgent. Your work really matters.

Caption: OneWeb end of programme ‘Finisher’ t-shirt��

I also appreciate that working in the right way requires constant vigilance. Working in a team that makes good choices on behalf of people is what we’re about. You’re the gatekeepers. It does mean asking questions such as ‘why’ and also occasionally saying ‘no’. Sure, a level of pragmatism is required, but if you never expose bad practice and bring it to the light, no change can happen.

Telling the truth can be hard. Showing the truth to an organisation or a colleague can often be uneasy. Yet, the hardest truths to tell are usually the ones about ourselves. For example, how can I tell you that I don’t have answers to your questions? It requires some humility to admit that you’re better equipped than me to make certain decisions because you are closer to the information. It requires a change of mindset – putting my ego to one side. To an extent we all had to do it.

My parental instincts will always kick in when it is to do with my team. So on the eve of closing down the programme and moving the team into Business As Usual (whatever ‘usual’ means), I hope you know that I will always try to do my best for you. I trust you to make the right decisions, to do what’s right for your well-being, for the good of the University, and most importantly for the good of the humans we are building digital services for.

Thank you for being a force for good. Keep pushing this work forward.

Thank you for being one bad**s team.

Yours, Ayala

If there is a large quantity of , either intentionally or not, this will be diminishing the search performance potential for that content. The idea is to identify and explore those pages that have untapped potential, and either re-link them to the website structure, or remove them entirely to reduce the continued risk of and . The main goal for SEO is to drive and improve search engine visibility for relevant searches, and we recognise that having a vast number of pages unlinked to any aspect of our website is negatively affecting the domain performance.

Search engines may still decide to index orphaned pages, this can be a result of other websites linking to it or if we have submitted it to search engines ourselves, but search engines still deem those not linked pages as less important than other pages that are internally linked.

How do we find orphaned pages?��

������Ƭing orphan pages is key to solving our problems. From our crawl reports and analysis, we have realised that a sizable proportion of our content is classified as orphaned, some of which is indexed.

There were a number of revealing results from our audit including:

1. a large number of and old redirected pages in sitemaps.
2. news, events, seminar pages dating back to 10 years ago.
3. many pages were purposely taken out of the navigation (content owners using this as a way of archiving their site or hiding pages) without deleting the page itself.
4. some old landing pages which could also be removed.

The majority of those pages which are unlinked can be classified as expired content, these pages are considerably contributing to our index bloat problem. A total of 36,000��unique unlinked urls (that are indexed in search results). The majority exist under old news articles in the directory /news/ and then a large number of instances under the schools (faculties) information architecture. Reflecting on our results from the crawl analysis, it was evident that we need to reduce these sections and proactively focus on outcomes to enhance performance.

Figure 1: detective work looking and finding orphan pages

It’s clean up time!

If you love crawl visualisations like we do at the University of Southampton you will notice that orphan pages will show up here which definitely provides perspective as well as creating an unusual piece of artwork to display at your workspace!

More seriously, how can we as SEO specialists prevent orphan pages from diluting our website’s performance, but also adding to a lot of digital waste. Firstly we need to understand what impact this has on key performance metrics. For example:

1. orphan pages have a low ranking capability
2. organic traffic is typically low
3. and crawl waste
4. content dead-ends and poor user experience
5. occupying valuable bandwidth, storage without driving traffic or conversions
6. overall affecting domain score
7. environmental burden to our digital estate.

In reality it may be a difficult task for any large website to have zero orphan pages. However, what matters is that we focus on creating a framework of structuring content in a user-centric way and aim towards a stronger internal linking structure. Orphan pages should be a minimal exception that proves the rule, rather than being treated as standard practice.

Maximise our efforts��

Crawl waste is very common across large domains that contain out of date or obsolete content that is not updated or removed. Leading to hundreds or even thousands of pages that do not need to exist, weighing the website down. Crawl waste exists where bots regularly crawl pages or broken links that they shouldn’t have to. That is why it is so important to address expired content, and have pages and links return an indexable status or at least a . We are already making gains with this kind of investment in web maintenance, this will really pay us dividends in the long term.

Caption: we keep looking for index bloat and orphan pages

Reduce our bloat

Continuing to hoard orphan pages that are tricky to find signals to search engines that a large portion of our content is not relevant enough to warrant ranking. The good news is it is simple enough to fix and we are already working hard on that front! Removal of low quality pages provides a better chance for more important pages to improve their search visibility in Google. We strongly believe having a plan for when to retire content is one of the most important parts of a content strategy.

Next steps for the University website

It is imperative for the future of the website that we provide users and search engine crawlers the best possible chance to discover our most important web pages. Removing expired content is another step forward in optimising our crawl budget, relieving some of that index bloat, and getting closer to improving overall user experience.

That’s not the end of it though. As part of OneWeb there was a strong focus on collaboration with the wider University and digital stakeholders. So if you hear from us with regards to minimising orphan pages, please help us to achieve some of our intended outcomes:

1. identify large content areas for removal, such as news, events, seminars.
2. clear up the domain by identifying errors in our sitemaps or pages resulting in a 404 due to being deleted.
3. identify if there are any high value content areas that are at risk.

We are working on a proposal on how to retire this vast amount of content, and will share more with you as we progress. In the meantime, we would like to invite you to share any ideas.

You can contact the SEO Digital User Experience team by emailing us:

Kath Sellwood: kath.sellwood@soton.ac.uk
Rayne Prendergast: r.e.prendergast@soton.ac.uk
Elise Corbin: e.corbin@soton.ac.uk

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

For example, voice search is probably something you’ve been hearing more and more about. It’s become more popular in recent years due to the improvements made by search engines. Here’s a quick look at why that matters for us:

Figure 1: Example of using voice search for UoS

Access needs first

Why does it matter?

As a team, our goal is to deliver digital services that meet the needs of all our diverse user groups.

We all know that voice assistants are on the rise and there is a vast amount of complexity in how we connect in a digital world.

As of 2019, there were an estimated 3.25 billion digital voice assistants being used in devices around the world. Forecasts from suggested that by 2023 the number of digital voice assistants will reach around 8 billion units – more than the world’s population.

Voice interfaces are also ‘old hat’ for many people with access needs and there’s much excitement in the accessibility community about voice assistants. Their dramatically simpler interface has the potential to help lots of people who read and consume content through their ears rather than eyes.

For our team, working on voice is an opportunity to meet the rising expectations of users and make our services more findable, accessible and usable.

Source:

Making UoS more understandable to search engines

Voice search allows a user to search via voice commands rather than written. First introduced in 2010 on the Google platform, it’s evolved over the past decade and become easier for users to interact with.

What made voice search a more popular method of finding information was thanks to the introduction of an algorithm change, known as ‘’, in 2013. This focused on ‘semantic search’, which enabled Google to recognise the user’s meaning and intent more successfully, and produce results that would satisfy a voice search query.

This is important because intent is about what users want to do, what they search for, and what you do with that data. We use SEO tools for it and the way people talk, or search can help us as a team to determine what they are trying to do. It also helps us to work alongside our content design colleague and help them prioritise content and determine the language we use to help our users.

An example of this, is the use of question and answer based content amongst our new course pages. What we’ve found is content that features as a structured snippet on Google search is most likely to appear for voice search queries too:

Source:

In this example, we’re using voice search for “what is criminology and psychology”. We’ve structured the content to produce an easily digestible section of information explaining the definition of criminology and psychology.

How does voice search differ from traditional search?

The way we use language when speaking is very different to when we’re typing. People tend to use shorter or more colloquial words and phrases when searching for information with their voices.

For example, a search for the University’s location may be expressed as: “University of Southampton location” when typed into Google. But when speaking to a voice assistant, a user is more likely to more naturally ask “Hey Google, where is the University of Southampton?”

Voice search tends to be very specific.

Source:

Why is voice search so popular?

Well, there’s a few reasons why…

It’s faster and easier to search

Voice search is significantly faster than traditional methods of searching for anything online; making it a very popular alternative to typing into a search engine.

Results tend to be more appropriate and convenient

When it’s faster and easier to find answers, it makes it more convenient for all. Where it becomes more appropriate is the use of structured data. The change in search behaviour resulted in an algorithm change as mentioned previously. This required SEO specialists and web developers to adapt code and structure data in a way that met the needs of search engines.

This means that not only are results faster, they are much more specific and appropriate for the user.

With the era of voice search well underway, structured data has enabled websites to get on board too. This is because it breaks down information in a way that search engines can understand and interpret. You may have heard of before, which is a specific format most websites use. Search engines are now able to read the code and use it to display search results in a specific and much richer way.

It’s more apt for mobile

Smartphones and tablets are everywhere and this makes it essential for anything to be made with mobile in mind. This applies to search engines too; with mobile-first indexing launched a few years ago, it has all worked to enhance users’ experience with their devices. With the ability to speak to your phone, voice search really took off.

How can we as a university adapt this into our SEO strategy?

So, with all that we know about voice search and the wild and wonderful workings of search engine algorithms – we’re left with a question: “Hey UoS, are we ready for voice search?”.

The answer is: yes.

As part of OneWeb, we’re looking at a strong focus on collaboration with our development team and UX disciplines to work with templates that allow for structured data.

You can’t understand content without understanding search intent data, so we’re incorporating and restructuring our content, as well as adapting the conversational language we use with help from content designers.

That’s not all though. We are always striving to improve our website’s user experience, and this is just the beginning. Voice search is a great opportunity for us and is likely to continuously evolve. What we need to discover is whether voice search is ready for university-based searches.

We would like to invite you to share any ideas you have on this topic with us! You can contact the SEO Digital User Experience team by emailing us. Thanks!

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.

The original business case for OneWeb hypothesised benefits such as:

• improved domain authority
• link performance to user needs
• operational cost savings for the University.

As a team, we’ve been asking ourselves how we can show the success of the programme to our community, and also leave a legacy behind.

Performance and data are not just for geeks

We take data and performance seriously. The University generates large volumes of data, mainly unstructured, and our public website produces millions of interactions with different user groups across a wide range of topics, products and services.�� Used correctly, this data can give us unique insights into the challenges and opportunities our end-users face, and help us to iterate and improve our services.

Working for a large and complex organisation brings some challenges in relation to data management and how you track performance, so we’re here to discuss what we’re doing about it as part of OneWeb.

Starting with OKRs…

What are OKRs and why are they important?

Big and small tech companies often use to set goals. Think of these as ways of documenting what is going to be delivered and what the value of those deliverables will be. Using this framework, the OneWeb Programme goals would be set out as follows:

Programme Level Objectives (what we are trying to deliver), for example:​

• Transform our web presence by creating a single domain that is fundamentally user-centric​
• Establish consistent processes for managing the content​ on that domain

Key Results (how we will know if we’ve succeeded because success is defined by whether or not the result has value!) might be:​

• Increase in enrolled students
• Improved performance of our website
• Migrate to the new technology platforms and away from the thousands of websites that comprise our current digital estate

These programme-level OKRs then cascade down into each project’s OKRs and become more granular.

Project Level Objectives:

• Produce actionable intelligence mapped against user needs
• Performance Monitoring becomes part of the delivery process of OneWeb projects, with clear success criteria accompanying every product launch
• Create a performance analytics strategy
• Tie each user need to a business goal – create a content workflow that ensures that each new piece of content ties directly to a user need that supports a business goal

Key Results (aka Benefits, Outcomes)

• The OneWeb team, and stakeholders, have a method of monitoring and managing the content services that are produced in the OneWeb programme
  • Allows us to show results on the work we’ve done and the impact it has had
  • Allows us to show that the programme has had a positive return on investment (ROI) for the business
• The insight and analysis guides critical business decisions that underpin product development and strategic decisions on the OneWeb programme

Tackling our challenges

Performance monitoring is not new to the University’s Digital Team. However, it’s fair to say that, due to the complexity in which we operate, it hasn’t been as effective as it needs to be. . Part of the legacy the OneWeb programme intends to leave behind is a new and improved standard for performance monitoring.

Consistently measured bounce rates and page performance across our new products will certaintly be welcome insights for our Product Managers. But our challenge is to report on how we’re meeting our users’ needs. For example, how do we know if we’ve met a user need such as “Do I want to stay in halls?”? The temptation is to immediately drill down into detail, but we are going to approach this from the top down.

Proposed solutions

We’ve proposed a reporting hierarchy that would provide users with high level view and allow deeper analysis than before.

Image: the multiple layers of performance monitoring

At the top, we will report on indicators such as ROI and domain level reporting. This would allow colleagues to drill down into products, such as our education product offering and the digital services that make up our students’ end-to-end journey.

The Undergraduate Journey was mapped in a previous phase of the Programme and identified key user needs at each stage. The various data points, metrics and stats were then mapped to the journey to reveal a conversion funnel. In this way, we hope to provide quantitative analysis that reveals if we are meeting our users’ needs and highlights opportunities for us to deliver a better user experience..

Image: snapshot of the UG reporting ideation session

It will take time to build a picture due to the business and users cycles we work with, and we will refine and iterate our approach to performance reporting accordingly.

Of course there’s no substitute for granular, on-page, analytics for product managers who want to know more about how users are interacting with their products (e.g. course pages). The more commonplace dashboards showing bounce rate and average time on page will still be provided at a course level as we’ve done previously. But, where possible, we want to provide information on subject, school and faculty level so that trends can be observed and used to set an internal benchmark.

Another challenge we face, as do lots of other large and complex organisations, is inconsistent data. It’s not always straight-forward to track every interaction, so we’re exploring how we can bridge it where possible.

For now, we use tools such as spreadsheets and dashboards. The emphasis is on providing performance monitoring and insight analytics to the product managers as soon as possible. This means we expect to see some analysis following the Beta launch in phase 3.

We’re not doing it to you, we’re doing it with you

Our mantra as a team has always been to collaborate with the rest of the University. We want to empower our stakeholders to put their trust in the performance data, and for our team to have the confidence to make decisions to improve our products. Other off-the-shelf analytics tools can be explored later when the results are shared with a wider audience, with a strong emphasis on transparency. Several organisations have even gone as far as to share their insight analytics with their stakeholders.

Thanks for reading

We’re keeping a close eye on the and sites to see how their product iterates in the open. I hope we got you excited.

We’ll be sharing our progress regularly here. But if you want to know more, please sign up to , or just drop us an email to keep in touch.

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

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

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

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

Definitely easier said than done!

How do users find us on search engines?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What have we found in practice?

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

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

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

So what’s next for the SEO team?

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

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

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

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

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

Written by: Kath Sellwood & Rayne Prendergast

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

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

International students aren’t (that) different:

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

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

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

Better content, starting now:

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

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

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

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

Spreading and embedding:

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

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

Being international resonates with UK students too:

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

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

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

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

A word about language:

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

Data – the final frontier:

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

Thanks for reading.

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

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