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.

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

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

Diagram 1: our disciplines work together

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

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

Lesson 1: genuine commitment to learning supported by a vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesson 2: pairing team members with experienced practitioners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lesson 3: setting up teams for success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our design principles and standards

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

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

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

Understand users and their needs

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

Design and build whole journeys

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

Make it simple to use

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

Make sure everyone can use it confidently

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

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

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

Iterate and improve frequently

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

Define what success looks like and measure performance

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

What’s in scope for the July release?

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

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

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

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

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

Our team already consists of Content, Design, Research, Product, Development and Delivery roles.

2019 has been an incredibly exciting year for us. We’ve grown and changed in ways I didn’t think were possible. We’re looking to accelerate (as well as consolidate) activities in 2020, and therefore we need some more new talent to join our multidisciplinary team!

We’re looking for people who:

• are passionate and care about the end-users
• able to roll up their sleeves to help us transform digital services for many of our user groups at the university
• are inquisitive and not afraid to challenge the status-quo
• can bring the inspiration needed to deliver digital services that will influence our sector and help our university succeed with pride
• can tell a story by using evidence and insights to make a positive impact on our users
• can work as part of a dynamic and multi-disciplinary team
• are therefore essentially unicorns

Image caption: Always be yourself unless you can be a unicorn. Then always be a unicorn.

A bit about us

We’re a nice bunch of people who really care about what we do. We have some truly exceptional individuals working for us, both in our teams and the university at large.

Image: OneWeb team – 1 April 2019

OneWeb as a programme is in its first year, so as we grow (fast), everything changes. It is – the idea that as a team grows, everything changes at roughly every third and tenth step. The things that work for a team of 3 people are very different to what works for a team of 10 people or 30 people. This has been very true for us. So how we communicate, collaborate and so on is constantly evolving.

I will be honest – we’re still finding our feet in terms of the team’s culture and ways of working, but we are already making a difference.

Where possible, we try and stick to the following principles to ensure our team’s culture is both welcoming and inclusive, so that everyone can thrive doing the best work of their careers:

• Work in the open and share our work with the rest of our colleagues (in and outside our teams) as often as we possibly can
• Collaborate as much as we can with our users, stakeholders and of course our teams
• Build in accountability as part of our ways of working – taking responsibility for our achievements and failures, celebrating success and making change for the better
• Be honest, impartial, objective and act with integrity. Basically, be bold.

We’re recruiting

If what I’ve just described above excites you, and you think that it sounds like something you’d like to be part of, please get in touch.

We want to meet with other people who want to work in this way.

Sounds great – how do I apply?

• All the jobs we’re currently recruiting for are on the .
• If you’re interested in working for us, and you’ve read the job description, please register with the website, and complete the application form.
• Please pay attention to the closing date and the week we’re planning to conduct some interviews.
• We’re planning to shortlist candidates quickly and inform you as fast as we can if you have been successful.

Credit: : You’re magic

Still unsure?

If you want to talk first, please get in touch with any questions. If you are unsure about whether to apply, want to recommend someone else, or just talk through the roles, please contact , Head of Digital and OneWeb’s Business Owner via or .

A challenging and exciting mission awaits for those unicorns who are not afraid of hard work and standing out.