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

The importance of dialogue

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

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

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

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

Enhancing design clarity

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

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

Welcoming feedback during development

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

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

Screen-sharing for enhanced UX/Dev accessibility work

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

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

Testing

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

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

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

This brings us to another important issue…

Maintenance and continuous improvement

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

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

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

Final thoughts

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

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

Hey!

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

Graduation day in front of Winchester Cathedral

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

My background

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

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

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

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

Getting started

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collaboration and Teamwork

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

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

Agile Framework

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

Dedication to Accessibility

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

Images from our Accessibility Day Workshop

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

Figma

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

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

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

What’s next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our design principles and standards

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

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

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

Understand users and their needs

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

Design and build whole journeys

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

Make it simple to use

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

Make sure everyone can use it confidently

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

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

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

Iterate and improve frequently

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

Define what success looks like and measure performance

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

What’s in scope for the July release?

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

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

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

His book is about the:

• power of design to influence
• lack of designers’ involvement within the design process
• absence of ethical considerations within the design process of products and services

It’s essential reading for any designer (or indeed non-designer), and it inspired me to write about a topic that has been on my mind for some time: emotional connection with users, and the point at which creatives stop being cool.

I’m going to keep this blog post specific – it’s a thought piece with some tips and hints on how to avoid commonly held misconceptions, with some practical advice and guidance when it comes to designing experiences.

Make it pretty (and make it work)

In the digital user experience team we are committed to representing the voice of our users through the design of services that meet their needs. Having just been through a big digital transformation programme, we’ve learned how to take a user-centred design approach to our work, because we recognise that by solving users’ problems, we will also be able to meet business objectives.

Many organisations say they value the importance of good design and ‘putting our customers at the heart of all we do’, while their services and systems fail to back up that corporate promise.

On reflection, there is a good reason for this. Generally speaking, digital functions grew out of physical functions such as Marketing, Communications and IT. These were traditionally the ‘go-to’ areas that were commissioned by stakeholders to create stand-alone platforms, creative campaigns and innovative solutions. As a result, so many companies still focus on stand-alone innovations before people. There seems to be a shared mythology that pleasing aesthetics are all that is needed to capture attention, elicit engagement, and smoothly convert another happy customer. But the more difficult question, with more up-front effort, is does it DO what it’s SUPPOSED TO DO in the first place.

Caption: ‘Pretty Vacant’ sign, courtesy of ��

You don’t go to the cinema to listen to the radio

We want people who visit us in an online or offline environment to have a seamless, frictionless experience, with very direct outcomes.

We want them, for example, to:

• feel connected with us
• remember us, even if just for a quick moment
• become our advocate
• tell their friends and family about the outstanding work we do
• carry our message in a crowded and noisy world

So that…

• they buy our goods and use our services,
• we can reduce our support cost and burden
• deliver against strategic outcomes… you get the idea!

We hope that in the longer term, it might even translate into a stronger brand advocacy, loyalty and eventually increased revenues. The ultimate utopia: users’ needs meeting business’ needs.

But emotional connection is about more than just pretty pictures and impressive-sounding vocabulary – it is about meaningful content that helps people achieve something they set out to do. In this scenario, a user walks away from their interaction with us feeling satisfied, and with an innate sense of the great care we took to meet their needs as easily and clearly as possible – now �ٳ�����’s a recipe for brand loyalty.

The way we choose to share this content matters, and certain mediums (or channels) are better than others to get that impact. I’ll be the first to admit that a web page on its own is hardly ever enough.

We need to choose the right tools, or channels, for the right job. Just like we can’t expect people who go to the cinema to listen to the radio: select the best tool available for the task.

Let me explain.

Art vs Design

The basic is to create, fashion, execute, or construct according to plan.

as something that is created with imagination and skill and that is beautiful or that expresses important ideas or feelings.

, she talks about the similarities in the two concepts but also how they are different in their own ways. She says that design is a deliberate practice with intentions to create with a specific purpose and plan. Art is an expression of the artist for decoration, and meant to be interpreted in any number of ways.

Good art is always interpreted, leaving the observer to find the missing pieces dropped on purpose. Whereas, good design should never be open to interpretation; it should be easily understood. In fact, good design when done well is invisible to the user ().

My reflection of that is that in many organisations, ‘design’ is often mistakenly interpreted as indulgent frosting on a functional interface. The problem with this view is that if design and users’ needs are not considered from the start, it’s extremely hard and costly to do something about it later on.

There’s a good reason why many corporate portals or systems don’t function to meet requirements. They have not been designed from end-to-end with both a carefully considered user and outcome in mind. Factoring into your business case two weeks of UX design before the end of a project may meet the requirement of ‘doing some design’, but in reality won’t make the user experience any better!

You cannot fix a cake once it’s been baked. wise words – not mine. Mike says critique should be embraced at every stage of the design process, by the very people who’ll be using your service. That’s how you increase a project’s chances of success. Get feedback early and often to decrease the overall costs of maintenance, repairs and doing big projects time and time again!

The extent to which aesthetics matter

Aesthetics do matter. It is a simple fact that good-looking products and user interfaces are perceived as more valuable and having more positive qualities, even if it’s not true! This is referred to as . Users tend to perceive that things which look better, will work better, even if they are not actually more effective or efficient.

Really good design takes this into account. It makes sure that content is presented to users in a way that is aesthetically pleasing, both as a first impression and also consistently at all stages in the user journey. This elicits a sense of trust in users, and rewards that trust by maintaining it throughout their experience.

But…

Undirected or non-intentional aesthetic design carries its own risks. If this attempt at emotional engagement compromises basic functionality, reliability or usability of an interface, the positive experience you want to promote will mutate into a rant-inducing disaster for our users.

There is no point in presenting an attractive interface that doesn’t help users do what they came to do… or worse, gets in their way.

Caption: Jacques Carelman’s “impossible teapot”. Image credit:

Real examples include social media posts without punctuation, which puts an added burden on people who use screen readers. Or the use of hashtags that don’t use capital letters to help distinguish words. Or the failure to add alt-text to images. Other examples from physical settings, are special signages in buildings or at events that are meant to help clarify how something works or is accessed. Without these signs, a user is left guessing, creating needless frustration.

It shows how design serves as the communication between object and user. We call this the “”: where design elements give you the wrong usability signals to the point that special signage is needed to clarify how they work.

Caption: Your sign says ‘push’ but your handles suggest otherwise. Image credit:

Examples and tips

Tip 1: how do we know what to design?

The answer is – always -your users know. The solution is firmly held by the people we’re designing the product or experience for. This is why we need to understand them better so we know what they need as well as what is aesthetically pleasing for them.

Caption: a OneWeb end of programme sticker: ‘The answer is always: the user knows.’

Your answer is also to start viewing ‘design’ as a series of structured, systematic, intentional decisions. Some of these may not look much like “design” as it is traditionally (and mistakenly) understood (i.e. visual styling). It could be in the form of processes, or structured data, which are some of the layers we have to consider when we design services or interfaces.

For example, text messages from an organisation may not be designed as an official communication channel, therefore causing confusion and preventing users from taking an action resulting in not meeting users and business outcomes. Or say we want to add entry requirements, or related news in multiple areas within a website, rather than creating content multiple times across multiple pages, we can instead structure and manage it in one place, whether we’re publishing it for the first time or the thousandth.

Tip 2: keep things simple

The functionality of products, platforms, and websites must not be undermined. Without it, we are designing our products in the name of art and without a purpose.

Even basics like the photography brief for some new imagery, should always come back to the same principle of fulfilling an intentional purpose: meeting our users’ needs in their own context:

• can I discern the image?
• can I see myself in these spaces?
• are the images authentic?
• am I inspired by your work?

Fundamentally, this is an essential part of creating accessible images and therefore services. You should test what problems these images are there to solve. Your work should be going in front of users, your actual customers, to increase your chances of success and as already mentioned, de-risk issues when you eventually go live.

Caption: K.I.S.S. Keep It Stupid Simple. Simplicity is a lot harder than complex, image credit:

Tip 3: persuasion does not happen at pixel level

As beautifully articulated by Mike Monterio, “a pixel is just a point of proof in the execution”. If we want to design the right way, we are going to have to do it by talking to people. Because designers get hired to solve business problems.

Design isn’t marketing. Both are important but different. Marketing is about persuading users that something is a good idea. Design is about making it self-evident. A product’s usability is often cheaper and easier to address than its persuasiveness, but in order to achieve this with good design, we should not just be feeding in at the beginning or the end of work – good design happens from the start and throughout.

Answering the question of what users want to achieve is done through user research. That is not the same as more traditional market research that has been carried out for years. User research focuses on understanding user needs and how to address them, rather than how to convince them to buy. The emphasis is on observing their behaviour, rather than canvassing their opinion.

As an example, we got insights from user research for some of our study products, which are around building emotional connection. It was all about:

• being able to see the university’s places and spaces, the people (staff and students)
• hearing students tell their stories about their experiences in their own words – all about getting a true insight into their possible future
• being able to feel that this is a good choice for them

This then informed our content strategy in the selection of which content to show. In many cases this is content that hasn’t previously been published, or not published in a way that will meet these needs.��A survey or focus group could have possibly suggested some of these insights, but they wouldn’t have allowed us to find, try out and validate the best ways to execute our design solutions.

Tip 4: solving the problem can’t happen until you understand the problem

That generally means talking to people who are experiencing the problem – not your colleagues, or your friend, or your next door neighbour – unless of course they are among the people who will be marginalised as a result of your product design.

There also had to be a socio-economic lens to the design decision making, similar to those in an article by . Basically any organisation has to consider the impact of change on users, especially the ones who could be excluded by any bad decisions.

Tip 5: not understanding the scope of your work is a problem

Generally speaking, organisations are not very good at articulating business outcomes, and this makes it much harder to understand the scope of the problem you are trying to solve.

Example: “we need more revenue” is not a problem, it is an observation. Because it is not a problem, it also doesn’t have an actual solution, and if you attempt to seek one, you’ll find yourself bogged down in endless speculation that produces few results.

“Our customers drop off during the onboarding experience, which lowers our conversion rate and is leading to lost revenue” is a problem. It is specific, informed and, perhaps most importantly: actionable. Armed with this, a digital user experience can begin the investigation that will eventually lead to a meaningful answer.

A big part of what design is about is to give us a problem to solve with some measurable outcomes that explain what metrics you are looking to move.

Tip 6: not doing research to understand the problem is a problem

Back to the cake metaphor, it’s always a good idea to make sure that the cake is baked with the right ingredients for the right person. And it’s always a good idea to have a good peek behind the curtains to get your assumptions tested. I am forever grateful for challengers who kicked the tyres during usability testing or prototyping. I’d much rather it happened at that point in time, before the team released something that people cannot use. The real value of user research comes from increasing our understanding of who our users are. With every study, every interview, every interaction, our team gets to know our users a little bit better, including the context in which the users work. Then design, test and iterate!

Gathering the right feedback to understand what will drive the connection with users is a gift. “I like it”, or “this looks good ” is not good feedback because it only gives us part of the picture. It doesn’t tell us if someone can use a service, or what frictions they encounter, and does it do what they need it to do. Data and metrics can’t fully answer these questions and they can’t steer you towards the best solutions. This is why we use both qualitative and quantitative research techniques. Data tells you what is happening, qualitative research tells you why and helps you figure out how to solve problems. We talk to people, we get under the surface of what is happening. Good feedback is done through observations in order to identify how to improve a service or a product. Start by outweighing the evidence. Learn what works, learn what doesn’t work ().

Frustration costs

When something is not designed it becomes messy. Not joined up. Annoying. Not user-centric. You make your users work extra hard. In a digital world, extra unnecessary work translates to users going elsewhere to get their needs met.

was developed by the in 2001 as a communicative model for illustrating the variation in companies’ use of design. It suggests that when an organisation adopts design as part of its business strategy, �ٳ�����’s a positive link with higher revenue.

Caption: Design Ladder lists four levels of design.

We’re seeing many companies that understand this link. But the truth is large organisations are orientated around themselves, not the end-user.

As a design team, we’re in a position to help users make decisions, but also for our university. (Jared Spool). It creates frustrations, generates calls, and increases development costs through rework and waste. It also damages the environment (, Gerry McGovern).

We’re therefore in a unique position to research and test where poor design costs our organisation money.

In addition, try to ‘flip’ the perspective and see the choices you want to present from the outside. Avoid flooding with options, but bear in mind the balance between users’ time and comfort zones for handling options for a digital product. Guiding them to select between clear options that will get them somewhere quickly will take the work out of the user experience and reward the user and organisations alike.

Using common design tools and patterns, colour, line, contrast, help people consume information and make decisions more easily. “This is specifically the case for designing forms, or when you convince someone to take an action – the way typeface, colour and layout fit together says a lot about a brand and shapes new users’ perceptions.” (Aaron Walter, ).

Conclusion

Bear in mind that the aesthetic-usability effect has its limits. A pretty design can make users more forgiving of minor usability problems, but not of larger ones.

At the end of the day if:

• the user can’t find the product, the user can’t buy the product.
• the service has multiple interactions that aren’t consistent visually or that haven’t been designed for access, you end up failing those people you were meant to serve in the first place.

Even great-looking sites will have no revenue if they suffer from poor findability. The emotional connection is therefore derived from being able to complete the task efficiently.

From a pragmatic point of view, we need to master the right balance between the design, functionalities, and user experience, planning, thinking ahead, doing deep analysis and being careful and considered in constructing something that will be solid, reusable and stable. Form and function should work together. When interfaces suffer from severe usability issues, or when usability is sacrificed for aesthetics, users tend to lose patience. On the web, people are very quick to leave.

Final notes

There are many important points raised in this article. Many of them are underpinned by good standards and assurance check-points.

If you want to hear more about it, we will be hosting an Ask Me Anything session, and we will be happy to answer your questions then. To find out more first, .

Huge thanks go to Mark, Kate, Jonny and Claire for helping make this blog post better.

Links to articles and further resources:

• (Ayesha Ambreen)
• (NN Group)
• (Don Norman)
• , (Jared Spool)
• (Jared Spool)
• (Mike Monteiro)
• (Danish Design Council, issuu document)
• (Aaron Walter)
• (Smashing Magazine)
• (Jesse Russell Morgan, UX Collective)
• (Ben Holliday)
• (Gerry McGovern)
• (Gareth Ford Williams)

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

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: �ٳ�����’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.

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Resources we learn from:��

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

User research is important

According to user research focuses on:

Understanding behaviours, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies.

Content designers put user needs front and centre. We’re 30 years on from the creation of the web and user experience is now a mature field. We can’t therefore underestimate the sophistication of today’s web users. They have:

• little time
• many distractions
• high expectations

An often quoted metric from the confirms how little written content users actually read on the average web page:

On the average web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

This makes relevance and usefulness a high priority for any organisation. Since finding information is the main activity of a visitor to our website, we need to help them do or find what they need. User research gives us the information to design content that meets their requirements.

Useful content is good for business

If our content isn’t meeting user needs we’re essentially operating in broadcast mode, holding our breath and hoping for the best. That’s bad for the user and bad for business.

So making content useful is mutually beneficial. You’re respecting users by giving them what they need and you’re valuing their time. Plus, you’re meeting the objectives of the business.

The organisation benefits by:

• saving time
• improving productivity
• avoiding rework costs
• enhancing reputation
• generating trust

Really, it is a no-brainer!

We are not our users

Nor are we mind-readers. If we don’t do research we’re making guesses about who is using our site and what their needs are. Thinking hard about what they might need, while commendable, is meaningless. It’s evidence we want. We wouldn’t make assumptions about a piece of academic research before the findings are known, so why do it with our users?

Source:

And we mustn’t forget that our users are human beings – complex, unique and surprising. As Maya says: ‘We don’t know what they don’t know.’ Visually impaired users, for example, have specific requirements which include catering for screen-reading software.

Informing our actions using data is the University’s lifeblood so it makes perfect sense to align this approach with our content development.

Don’t ask users what they think

Short and sweet, but what a user thinks and what a user does are often radically different. It’s a mistake some people make and they’re left scratching their heads when applying their findings changes nothing. This is why observation is an essential technique in the user research toolkit.

More participants isn’t a guarantee of better results

When you’re planning your recruitment brief, recruiting more participants won’t necessarily mean you’ll have a better quality research outcome. Making sure you have a representative sample is more valuable.

Choosing the right timings, location and duration for your research sessions is also crucial – what works well for current engineering postgraduates may not work well for graduate-entry nursing enquirers. Mature students who might be working parents, for example, will have a host of contextual distractions. It’s also important to factor these distractions into the content we create for them.

Representative samples are important to ensure the right people are part of your group
Source: courtesy of Maya Wiseman

Defining research goals and questions are must-do’s

Goals are there to identify, understand and gauge a problem by answering a series of questions such as:

• how are people using this page?
• what do they want from it?
• why aren’t they completing their task?

Good questions are about users rather than services, and they must have an implication for the work. If they don’t, rework or remove them entirely.

It’s fine to mix things up

Apparently using mixed methods is on trend! But it’s true that most projects would benefit from a minimum of several approaches. It’s also wise to carefully consider the most appropriate method for your scenario rather than plumping for techniques you are most familiar with.

For example, using both quantitative and qualitative techniques provides very different but equally valuable and often complementary findings.

Some methods are outlined in this table. Each has its place in helping surface the detail needed to inform content development.

Staying useful is a continual evolution

One constant we can be sure of is change, and in my new role it’s all about embracing it. After all, the habits and behaviours of our web visitors, whether they’re prospective students, members of our local community or potential research partners, do not remain the same.

By putting users at the heart of our process we can ensure our content continually evolves and stays useful.

Proving value

As content designers we recognise that user research is a team sport and can be hugely beneficial to the University. The more we learn about our users and the more we share our knowledge, the more value we can deliver.

As a team, we test and iterate content with users regularly. We want to ensure that they can find it, understand it and act on it. If they struggle, we tweak and refine until it perfectly meets their user needs – or, at least, a bit more perfectly than it did before.

Moving forward, we want to shout more loudly about our successes. We want to be tracking metrics that matter and prove the value of user-centred content to the University. We want to share what we’ve learnt about our users and ensure that those findings inform every part of the University’s communications.

If we don’t meet user needs, we can’t expect to meet business needs.

A big thank you to Maya and everyone who contributed to this post. Some further user research reading (courtesy of Maya):

A bit about me

Hi there!

I’m Sarah, a recent graduate of the Games Design and Art programme at Winchester School of Art (WSA). I spent 2 years on the Graphic Arts programme before transferring to Games Design, where I applied a further user-centred approach to my design work. My interest in user experience design stemmed from a short-term project with a London-based product design studio during my degree; where I discovered the lean UX process and found that this could also be applied to games. This led to my research focus for my , addressing the need of bridging tactile games and technology.

I discovered the OneWeb programme through the Digital Team blog, exploring the recent work with the undergraduate and postgraduate course pages. I was really interested to see a user-focused approach within the University’s marketing and expressed interest in getting involved. This has seen me join the team as a UX design intern and getting stuck into the live project.

What has been good

My internship so far has involved me working within the Student Experience Team researching and designing around the ‘what it is like to live in…’ pages. The team have been extremely welcoming and are well experienced, it has been a pleasure to be able to get involved with their work.

Image: our student experience team ‘in-action’

This has seen me experiencing agile development through processes such as sprint planning, daily stand-ups and retrospectives. I’ve found these to be really helpful with organising and communicating with the team and ultimately reflect often about my completed work and how to adapt my working practices in further sprints.

Recently I’ve been able to interact with current students through a series of design workshops, to gain a better understanding of their retrospective needs and desires for the website. I was able to take part in one of the sessions as a participant and then later as a moderator in another session. This challenged me to continually encourage students to dive deep into their experiences and feelings, thinking about open-ended questions to establish these conversations.

Image: some design wireframes created by students��

I have also taken part in a make-and-do workshop with the team, which gave me opportunities to communicate ideas and approaches that can support both prospective students and business needs to the rest of the team. As an alumna from Winchester School of Art, I have been able to fill knowledge gaps about the Winchester student experience, demonstrating its differing culture. This has been useful in how we address the separate campuses within the living pages.

From these research and make-and-do sessions I have started to explore my core role as a UX designer on the team, by creating ideas for map assets that can be utilised across the living pages. These designs will give a sense of a visual picture for prospective students with potential to point out current student experiences at icon pinpoints. This has also made me explore a filtration system from ideas such as category selection to search based terms. By carrying out this task I am understanding better how to communicate key interactions and how they will interact with new and existing content.

What has been difficult?

While taking part in both the student and team-based workshops there have been many opportunities to feedback ideas to conclude the sessions. These have been imperative to our development of sprints and, whilst contributing, I’ve found these daunting, giving an overview and not delving deep into the ‘whys’ of each decision. This is something I hope to practice more through further team workshops as well as meetings, which I have confidence in due to the friendly nature of the team.

What would I like to do more of?

I’m looking forward to exploring more component design, such as the maps component that will be used across living pages. I’m finding the interactive design elements to be challenging and want to find further solutions to satisfy user stories. From this I also hope to become involved with prototyping to get a sense of how these components work within the architecture, multiple page levels and visual design. I would also like to continue the collaborative design work we do as a team to establish key goals and approaches of components, as they have greatly aided my individual design work with the maps component.

How can people get involved?

The OneWeb blog has been a great tool for me to understand the different sections of the programme and I highly recommend checking out the posts to understand the team’s ongoing developments. There are lots of opportunities to contribute to the OneWeb team whether that be through usability testing, workshops, Show and Tells or joining our team. There are regular jobs and internships posted through the University, which are great opportunities to apply for and become part of this creative, user-centred team.

As part of the programme, we are constantly considering how we get more students involved with our teams. If you would like to get involved, please get in touch.