The carbon cost of using images and videos on a webpage often goes unnoticed but cumulatively can add up. Dono Abdurahmanova and I have presented at both the UCISA digital sustainability conference and the Green Software Foundation Scotland meet up in the last week or so on the topic of sustainable media use.

The key theme of the talk was around intentional use of media and our efforts to shift the narrative around the perceived necessity for videos and images to create effective content. We also shared how we’ve been working with web publishers at the University to quantify the impact of their media content. You can read more about this aspect of the work in Dono’s blog.

Do students actually watch videos on websites? 

We finished by highlighting some steps you can take to make your images and videos more sustainable, if you decide they are the right medium to communicate your message.

The environmental cost of media use

Media is and will continue to be a key part of digital content strategies, that is a given and it undoubtedly does have its place as an effective communication tool – although the environmental impact cannot be underestimated.

Every page view, video stream and file download consumes energy and generates emissions. This is a fact which often goes unnoticed, as it’s not visible or as well known as other types of day-to-day activities which everyone knows create emissions.

When talking about the ‘weight’ of a web page (as I do in the title of this blog) this refers to the cumulative size of the files that are needed to load a webpage, such as images, videos, text, scripts, etc. These elements add weight to the page and the heavier the page, the greater the estimated CO2 emissions generated.

Here are a few statistics around the environmental impact of media use which provide a bit of context around why we felt it was important to think of ways to raise awareness about digital sustainability.

Digital content generally

When thinking about digital content generally, on average digital content consumption emits around 229kg of CO2 per person per year, which is up to 4% of our individual carbon footprint.

​Transition Templates AI & Digital: Pathways to Net Zero+  Dr Joanna Boehnert

Webpages

When it comes to webpages – globally the average web page produces approximately 0.36g of CO2 equivalent per page view. For a site with 10,000 monthly views, that is 43kg of CO2 equivalent per year.

Website Carbon Calculator v4 | What’s your site’s carbon footprint?

Images and videos

Then drilling down further into images and videos – streaming one hour of video content generates approximately 55g of CO2 equivalent.

Carbon impact of video streaming | The Carbon Trust

Despite their environmental impact, images make up between 49-58% of the total size of an average web page.

HotCarbon

​The starting point is to consider the value of the image or video

Often the messaging around digital sustainability can be dominated by talk of optimisation, compression and technical aspects like images formats and file sizes. However, this is actually a step ahead of where the starting point should be, which is whether the image or video adds value to the user in the first place. This is a principle which is also included in the Institute for Sustainable IT – Handbook of Sustainable Design for Digital Services.

When considering the value of media, it can be helpful to ask the following questions:

• Does it enhance clarity, context or understanding?
• Could you convey the same information without it?

While the answers will be context specific, often you can still provide the user with effective, useful information without it.

Intentional rather than automatic use of media is often not only better for the environment but also your engagement too, as it can reduce the cognitive load for the user and will likely resonate more with your audiences when used in targeted ways rather than in abundance.

“The process of behaviour change starts with awareness”

This is a quote taken from James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, which refers to the fact that people can’t change their habits if they aren’t aware of them in the first place. To this end we’ve been trying to spread the word about digital sustainability and in particular the impact of using images and videos. In doing so encouraging people to rethink their habits in relation to media use.

We’ve done this through reshaping our image guidance for the central content management system and also including the topic in our Content Improvement Clubs.

Reshaping image guidance

Working with the EdWeb service team, we reshaped the ‘Sourcing the right image’ guidance page for EdWeb 2, our central content management system. The page was heavily focused on where to find images and which were the best images to use, as these are often the first questions asked, based on an assumption that images are a necessary part of creating content.

We shifted the emphasis and tone of the page, so that it focused first on considering whether you need to use an image, highlighting the importance of both digital sustainability and accessibility when making this decision. After this we included the guidance to follow if an image is required and how to source one.

We hope that this change in approach helps to reframe the messaging and thinking around image use and encourages more intentional use of images.

You can find the new guidance on the EdWeb 2 hub.

Best practice for image use (University login required)

Including digital sustainability in our Content Improvement Clubs

Each month the UX Service runs Content Improvement Club sessions for anybody within the University who works with content. It’s a chance for them to meet up with other publishers and learn more about content design. At the beginning of the year, we ran a session on ‘5 top tips for improving your content in 2026’ and we made one of the top tips effective image use.

As part of the session, we invited attendees to look at the various different images from across the University web estate and think about which of them added value and what that value was. It was an interesting exercise and once people started to apply their mind to the question, they soon realised that some images added more value than others.

For example, having a stock image of a beach for an internal staff pensions guidance page was deemed to be more decorative, rather than aiding understanding, or helping users complete their task. Whereas the images of students on campus tours, or using University facilities, had more value in attracting prospective students by giving a human feel to events and give an idea of life at the University.

Tips for sustainable image use

If you decide images are the right medium to communicate your message – here are some tips on how you can make them more sustainable.

• Avoid generic stock images – eye tracking studies show that people tend to ignore large or generic images. Using real-life images of people interacting with services or buildings, which are relevant to the objectives of your content is likely to increase their value / impact and make them a more worthwhile addition to the page.

 

• Consider the format of your image – there are various optimisation and compression tools that can help you to reduce the file size of images, without impacting on quality. At the University, we use the WebP format for images in our central content management system which results in files being 25% to 34% smaller than JPEGs.

 

• Consider implementing an image upload size – this can help to reduce the usage of energy-intensive large files. At the University, we’ve implemented an image upload size of 1MB for the central content management system.

Make sure that images are accessible

Whilst the focus of this blog is on sustainability, as online content grows, accessibility becomes increasingly important.

When adding an image into your content, including alternative text (‘alt text’) ensures that more users can access the information it provides. Assistive technologies such as screen readers rely on alt text to convert content (such as text, buttons, images and other screen elements) into speech or braille. This allows blind or partially sighted users to access the same information as sighted users.

You can read more about how to write good alt text in my colleague Mel Batcharj’s blog.

How to write good alt text – what we covered in our March Content Improvement Club session

Tips for sustainable video use

• ​Disabling autoplay – this is a simple yet impactful action that can reduce energy consumption and lower the data demand. Autoplay adds unnecessary weight to the page, causing videos to load and stream regardless of whether the user has chosen to engage with it.

​​

• Including a written summary and transcript – this can support users who prefer reading as well as making your content more accessible. Both summaries and transcripts can help users get the key information they need and reduce the likelihood of them loading a video only to abandon it partway through as it didn’t meet their needs.

​

• Keep videos short and well signposted – we’ve seen from our research that user attention spans are shrinking, particularly when they are task-focused, looking to find the information they need. Therefore limiting the length of videos could help with engagement as well as sustainability. In addition using timestamps or chapter markers means that people don’t necessarily need to watch the whole video, they can skip to the relevant sections, reducing the amount of time the video is playing for, therefore reducing the energy usage.

 

• ​Avoid repetition of information – try not to repeat the same information in the video as you already cover on the webpage.  If you notice that think about whether you need the video – what extra value is it adding, that the text on the page doesn’t already offer.

​

• Think about alternative formats – rather than video could audio files, or podcasts work? Can you communicate your message without the video? Where audio adds value but visuals are not needed, consider using the MP4 audio format instead. Audio files are significantly smaller, require less energy to stream, and can carry the same content at a fraction of the environmental cost.

In January 2026, Alex Burford, a learning technologist from the School of Informatics contacted the UX Service following completion of the new Effective Digital Content online course. Alex had really enjoyed the course and was keen to explore ways to implement the content design best practice principles it teaches within Open Course – the platform that the School of Informatics use to share their course materials.

Informatics Open Course Materials

Identifying key areas for improvement

Alex had received positive feedback from students who were able to successfully locate their course materials. However, from our discussions and a review of the content on the Open Course platform, (which relies heavily on tables), we both felt there was scope to review the current layout and explore potential alternatives.

Within the tables, we also identified that a more consistent and informative approach to formatting links as well as creating more effective headings could improve the user experience.

In addition, Alex was keen to look at the best ways to support Open Course publishers with content design and embed ways to make it easier for them to prepare effective content. To this end, we talked through potential guidance and training that could be developed with a specific focus around Open Course content.

We spoke with Open Course publishers to gain their perspectives

Before progressing any further with our ideas, we were keen to establish a baseline understanding of how Open Course is currently used by those who publish content on it. This would help us to learn about their processes and approaches, identify pain points as well as areas that were working well.

Alex reached out to Informatics colleagues to see if they would be happy to speak to us about their experiences of using Open Course. In late January / early February 2026 we carried out a series of semi-structured interviews.

Format and aims of the interviews

The UX Service facilitated the interviews via Teams, observed by Alex, to learn about the experiences of Informatics colleagues who published content on Open Course. Informatics colleagues shared their screen and talked through how they achieve content publishing and formatting tasks in Open Course. This enabled us to see first-hand how they went about these tasks and hear their perspectives and feedback.

The aim was to confirm areas that were working well and also the main pain points. We were keen to learn the reasons why tables were used, what the experience was like for those editing content within them and understand more about their approach to writing headings and links.

We gained a lot of useful information from the interviews both from a content perspective, but also in relation to more technical aspects relating to the platform itself which Alex could feedback to Graham Dutton, the developer working on Open Course.

This information then provided the basis on which to form an action plan around how to make improvements and decide on the best way to provide support and/or guidance.

Tables: were they necessary, if so could they be improved?

Following our discussions with Alex and the semi-structured interview insights, we felt we had a good understanding of how tables were used and the pain points relating to editing content within them.

We first wanted to explore whether tables were needed, or if there were alternative layout options to avoid the need for tables completely. If they were needed, we could then look at how they could be improved?

Prototypes were created by the UX Service

The UX Service mocked up some prototype tables, initially in Word before also creating them in an Open Course playground site we had access to. We used the following ‘Schedule and materials’ page, where almost all information was displayed in a table.

INF2-SEPP: Schedule and Materials | Open Course Materials

Prototype one

Our first prototype involved removing tables completely and using headings and paragraph text to display the same information. What we soon realised was that this made the information hard to scan and increased the length of the page. We felt from trying this approach, there were definite benefits to having a structured column layout to help communicate key dates and materials for course participants efficiently.

Prototype two

Our second prototype then explored how we could improve the current table layout and make it as accessible as possible. The existing page had a continuous table with six columns. All headings and links were included in the table itself which made it quite hard to navigate. Also, the number of columns meant that text was wrapping onto two lines quite often, which again impacted on readability.

We explored presenting the same information in a two-column layout, using rows with clear left-hand headings to signpost key information. We also split the continuous table into multiple tables, one for each week of the term. Column and row headers were also applied within the table editor tools. These changes we felt improved the overall look and feel of the page but also made it easier to navigate to the information you needed.

Stress-testing prototype two

After sharing both options with Alex, we decided to proceed with prototype two and carried out some further testing to make sure it was fit for purpose.

JAWS – Screen reader testing

Using the prototype in the our Open Course playground site, we used JAWS to test out how the content on the page would be navigated and interpreted by a screen reader.  Whilst this approach may not fully capture how all users of assistive technology navigate, interact and experience the page, it did provide useful insights around how tables in Open Course interact with screen readers. Overall, the new table layout responded well.

We found that JAWS:

• read out the number of columns and rows in a table as expected.
• navigated the table content in a logical order. It interpreted tabled cells moving from left to right, first reading the column headers (‘dates’, ‘themes’) before information and links within the cells.

JAWS didn’t pick up on blank cells within the table. Instead, it moved to the next table cell which had content within it. Therefore, we recommended that if this table layout was adopted that there should be no blank cells to aid clarity. Where there was no information to put within certain cells, text such as ‘no milestone’ or ‘no tutorial’ should be used.

We are also aware that screen reader users can and may wish to jump from table to table on a page. When navigating in this way, JAWS moved table content to table content without reading out the assigned ‘Week X’ heading we had inserted. Therefore, when you have multiple tables on a page, it’s hard for the user to tell which table they are on. A potential solution to aid understanding could be to incorporate the week number within the table itself, rather than using headings.

Magnification and responsiveness on mobile

When tested, the page (including tables) responded well to 400% magnification, with no loss of information. This check was carried out to ensure that the content reflows correctly for users who routinely view web pages using zoom functionality. We wanted to ensure that information did not move off screen or overlap when zoom was used.

The tables also responded well in mobile view, including when the screen was rotated. This is important to test given the increased usage of mobile devices to access digital content, to ensure all users were able to easily read / navigate the information on the page.

UX Service recommendations

Recommendation to use prototype two table layout going forward

Following our prototyping and stress-testing, we reported back to Alex that prototype two was the option we would recommend.

Recommendation to consider best formats for guidance on headings and links

From reviewing the pages and considering the insights gained from the interviews, we also felt that it would be beneficial to create guidance around:

• writing effective headings and using correct heading levels in tables
• how to use links and write effective link text.

Having this guidance close to hand, ideally accessible directly from the edit screen of the Open Course platform would be preferable to enable ease of access for users.

Reflections and next steps

As a team, we really enjoyed working with Alex on the project. It provided us with the opportunity to apply the content design best practice principles that we teach specifically to learning and teaching content. It was interesting to explore and test out options for using tables in a different context, outwith the central EdWeb 2 Content Management System, for student-facing content.

We are glad that the Effective Digital Content online course provided the impetus for this work. We hope that the course continues to provide the starting point for interesting conversations about how digital content can be improved as it reaches wider audiences around the University.

We look forward to continuing to work with Alex in relation to the guidance and potential implementation of the new table layout before the next semester or at an appropriate time in the future.

It’s been a whole year since we launched the new and refreshed Effective Digital Content online course. To celebrate the one-year anniversary I thought I would reflect on how the year has gone, share a bit more about what we’ve learnt along the way, and what is coming next.

If you are keen to read more about the development of the course up until the launch date, you can take a look at our previous series of blogs.

Effective Digital Content blog series

Over 350 people have completed the course in the last year

The aim of the Effective Digital Content course has always been to share content design best practice across the vast University web publishing community. We are really happy that so many people have successfully completed the new version of the course, particularly given the new workbook element which we appreciate comes with an additional time investment. It shows a real willingness from the web publishing community to learn more about how to create effective web content.

As a result, over 350 Digital Badges have been issued under the University’s Digital Badge scheme ‘BadgEd’. Again, this is a real positive in terms of showcasing continuing professional development within our publishing community and we’ve seen people sharing their badge with their networks on LinkedIn.

Effective Digital Content badge details

The course workbook – reaping the rewards of trying something new

We’ve written in previous blogs about the decision to add the new workbook element to the course. For us this was very much a case of trying out something new, as it wasn’t something that had been explored in previous versions of the course.

The workbook idea was born out of a wider project to rethink our content design training approach. The key premise of the workbook is to provide a chance for people to apply the course principles to their own context and receive feedback from someone in the UX Service.

Practical application of the course principles with the opportunity to gain valuable insights from the UX Service was something we had seen work really successfully in our Content Improvement Clubs (our regular meet ups for anyone who publishes web content at the University). The task of delivering this at scale given the ratio of UX Service team members to web publishers was quite a daunting task, but one which I’m pleased to say has been a great success.

Over the last year 350 people have completed the workbook and received personalised feedback from the UX Service on their submission – no mean feat from either side!

We’ve had positive feedback about the personalised workbook feedback

We are so pleased with how the workbook has been received and the effort people have taken in completing it. We’ve seen people updating and improving their web pages as they complete the workbook exercises and in response to the tailored feedback we provide. It has been really rewarding to help facilitate and see tangible positive change in this way.

Here’s what a couple of people who have taken the course have said about their experience of completing the workbook.

I enjoyed completing the workbook as it allowed me to reflect on the various aspects of the course. Receiving feedback on the workbook was a great addition and not something I’ve had in other training courses I’ve completed.

Whilst time-consuming, this was very valuable as it really enabled engagement with the material, enhanced my learning and I feel confident in updating the web page I am responsible for now. The feedback was helpful too, thank you.

We’ve gained valuable insights from reviewing the workbooks

The UX Service have also found it incredibly useful to hear directly from publishers through their workbook answers. The process of reviewing and responding to each submission has provided invaluable insights which can help us to enhance the training we provide by responding to topics and areas which we know are most relevant.

Since the launch, we’ve also made further improvements to the workbook activities as well as the course modules in response to feedback we’ve received.

Taking on the task of reviewing each workbook has been a significant new workload for the team and we’ve been on quite the learning curve. However, we are pleased with how collectively we’ve taken on the challenge and the feedback turnaround times we’ve managed to sustain.

We are evolving and refining our processes to keep up with increasing demand

As demand for the course continues to grow from colleagues across the University, we are looking at ways to refine and automate some of the administrative processes involved in receiving and logging workbook submissions. This is to ensure we can continue to provide tailored feedback to an even larger number of people across the University.

We are developing the course for the Short Courses platform

Following a showcase of the course at the UCISA UX Community Day in September 2025, we received interest in the course from the wider Higher Education sector, with colleagues from other UK universities requesting access to the course content, so that they could apply the concepts to content publishing in their respective institutions.

In response, we are currently working with colleagues to deliver a proof-of-concept course for the Short Courses platform by summer 2026. You can read more about how we are repositioning the course for an external audience in Emma Horrell’s blog.

Repositioning Effective Digital Content as a short online course: A product approach

How to take the course 

If you’d like to take the Effective Digital Content course, you can find more information on our course page, including a link to enroll through People and Money.

Effective Digital Content 

This year the User Experience Service have been working on improving the University’s editorial style guide. Nick Daniels, Hannah Watson and I have blogged about previous aspects of this work:

• Why we’re refreshing the editorial style guide
• An analysis of responses to our editorial style guide survey
• Reviewing and rewriting the formatting section of the editorial style guide

In this post, I will focus on the work we’ve done to create a new page on University terminology for the style guide.

Our research findings led to the creation of a new University terminology page

An intrinsic part of the style guide refresh project has been looking at the way we write content across the University’s vast array of web pages to evaluate how we use, spell and punctuate certain words – identifying opportunities to reduce inconsistencies. In doing so, we recognised that there were a variety of University-specific words being written in varying ways, using different types of punctuation, capitalisation and abbreviation.

We also heard anecdotally through our research with style guide users about some areas of confusion around how to use certain University-specific terminology and the need for some clearer examples.

Colleagues questioned how they should be referring to the University in different contexts.

When am I allowed to say UoE rather than the University of Edinburgh?

We also heard about the confusion around how to write masters.

How do you refer to masters degrees? Does it have an apostrophe or not?

Bringing together the findings of both our desk-based research and user insights, we decided to create a page in the style guide dedicated to guidance on how to use specific terminology within the University of Edinburgh context.

We’ve expanded the previous ‘Referring to the University’ page, consolidating guidance from other style guide pages

We started our review process by looking at the ‘Referring to the University’ page, which previously sat within the ‘Language and tone’ section of the style guide. The page covered how to refer to the University of Edinburgh and when to capitalise the words ‘school’ and ‘college’. Whilst we felt that this guidance was still needed, the existing explanations needed clarification and more illustrative examples.

During our review of the guide as whole, we also noticed that other pages such as spelling, abbreviations and the PDF version of the guide included guidance on University-specific words/terms. Therefore, we decided to consolidate these, where relevant, so they all appeared together on the University terminology page for ease of reference.

The new page therefore covers guidance on:

• referring to the University
• writing the names of schools and colleges, including when to capitalise the words ‘school’ and ‘college’
• writing degree programme titles and awards, including honours and degree classes
• when to capitalise the word ‘masters’ and whether an apostrophe is needed
• words to avoid

University terminology style guide page

We’ve included more illustrative examples to aid understanding

Throughout our user research and also usability testing, the power of a good example has shone through. We’ve seen first-hand how it can often allow a user to cut through technical or grammatical explanations to understand how the rule or convention will apply in a practical sense.

Examples are therefore a key feature of the new style guide pages. We’ve used feature boxes to highlight examples throughout the pages of the guide, so they are easy to scan and locate. On the University terminology page, given the nuances in how you use certain words or phrases, depending on the context, we’ve often provided two or three different examples to hopefully make it clear how the term would apply in each case.

 

The University terminology page aims to enhance consistency

The importance of consistency, particularly when thinking about University terminology cannot be underestimated. It has a direct impact on the perception of the University’s brand and reputation.

A key example and perhaps the most important is how we reference the University itself. During our research we’ve seen many variations: Edinburgh University, UoE, ‘Edinburgh’, the University, The University of Edinburgh to name but a few.

If we aren’t consistent in the way we refer to the University and how we write more generally, we increase the likelihood that audiences (both internally, but particularly externally) will become confused or uncertain when consuming our content.

We hope that the new University terminology page helps to answer some of the questions you might have and provide you with confidence in how to use University-specific words/phrases in different contexts.

How to access the new University terminology page

You can access the new University terminology page in the ‘Language and tone’ section of the style guide

University terminology style guide page

We’ve also updated the abbreviations page of the style guide

Alongside the work we’ve been doing on University terminology, we’ve also reviewed and refreshed the abbreviations page, which is now called ‘Acronyms and abbreviations’. On this page you will find helpful guidance and practical examples on how to use shortened forms of words and phrases within your web content.

Acronyms and abbreviations style guide page

Next steps

Our work continues to keep updating the remaining pages of the style guide. Punctuation is next on the list, along with dates and numbers.

How you can get involved in shaping the new style guide

We are always on the look out for willing volunteers to test out new versions of style guide pages. If you would like to get involved, please get in touch with the User Experience Service: user-experience@ed.ac.uk.

Content Improvement Club is our regular meetup for web publishers. In our November session we covered events pages. We worked in groups to create a journey map of the information people need from an events page at different points in time. We also spent time peer reviewing events pages people had brought along.

We produce a lot of events content at the University

The idea to focus the session on events pages came about as we thought in the run up to Christmas there’s lots of events going on around the University. However, in reality the University events calendar is busy all year round both for internal and external events.

To give some context, as of May 2025, at a rough estimation there were just over 5,000 events page on EdWeb 2 (covering all existing, past and present events).

During the session we did a WooClap poll to get ideas from people in the room about the type of events they need to advertise. This showed the wide variety of events and it also helped us to decide which type of event to focus the journey mapping exercise on.

 

Journey maps can help you to assess how user needs change over time

Sarah Winters from Content Design London describes a journey map as a timeline, which shows the series of steps that your audience goes through, as they try to get from where they are to a desired goal.

The process of creating the map helps you to think through what a user needs at different points in their journey, which in turn helps you to assess how effective your content is.

For events pages, the information that users are going to need will likely vary depending on when you ask them and which stage of the process they are at. For example, what someone needs before signing up for an event will be different to what they need after they’ve attended.

More widely journey mapping can be a useful way to:

• analyse user needs in other contexts
• identify pain points
• get a collective view of a service (not just the bit you support)

We created user journey maps for a University in-person conference

In the session we took the example of a University in-person conference (as this was the most popular type of event from the WooClap poll) and in groups mapped out what information an attendee would need from an events page about the conference at different points in time.

We had identified certain key milestones in the journey before the session, but attendees added their own milestones as they went too.

The key milestones were:

• Deciding whether to attend
• Logistics of attending
• A week before the event (added by participants)
• The day before the event
• At the event
• After the event

Step 1: Map out tasks and questions

The first task was to think about the tasks that an attendee needs to complete and also the questions they might need to answer at each milestone. We did this by laying out the milestone stages in blue sticky notes and then used yellow sticky notes to add the tasks and questions underneath.

Step 2: Decide what information attendees need

The second task was to think about the different types of information attendees need from the page based on the tasks and questions previously identified. We did this by adding pink sticky notes under each milestone stage.

 

 

Summary of the key information attendees might need at each milestone

The journey mapping process was helpful to assess the content that attendees would need at different stages. During the session each group fed back on their journey map and shared their ideas among each other. This was a really useful way to create discussion between groups and highlight areas of difference between approaches.

We’ve consolidated some of the ideas people had about the key information event attendees might need at each key milestone:

Deciding whether to attend

• Event title, organiser and affiliation
• Date and time
• Event structure/overview and key note speakers
• Costs (sponsorship opportunities)
• Format and agenda
• Accessibility and venue facilities
• Contact details
• International considerations
• Sustainability
• Speaker opportunities

Logistics of attending

• Venue location (What3Words) or map
• Transport options
• Accommodation
• Catering
• Calendar invite
• GDPR
• Sustainability

A week before the event (added by participants) / the day before the event

• Reminder / confirmation email
• What to bring
• Directions to the venue
• Reminder about catering

At the event

• Programme / schedule
• Networking opportunities
• Note of the sessions you’ve pre-booked

After the event

• Event overview
• Session recordings and downloadable resources
• Early bird discounts for next conference

We peer reviewed a selection of different events pages

A key part of our Content Improvement Club format is providing the opportunity for people to bring along a page from a site they work on and discuss it with colleagues from across the University. For this session we had time after the journey mapping to take a look at some event pages people had sent through to us in advance. Each group picked a couple of pages to review and provide feedback to each other on.

The idea was to think about how the content catered for the user needs we’d previously identified, as well as how effective the order and layout of the information was. It was great to see people discussing their pages and getting a fresh perspective from somebody outwith their team.

 

How to hear about our next session

We’ll promote our next session via our mailing list. If you’re interested, please sign up:

Join the UX and Content Design mailing list (University login required)

We’re always interested to hear topic ideas for these sessions. It would be really helpful if you could let us know any ideas you have using this form:​

Suggest a topic for Content Improvement Club

Other training that we offer

More training is listed on the User Experience Service website:

Training | User Experience Service

This year the User Experience Service have been working on improving the editorial style guide. For context, Nick Daniels has written about why we embarked on this project:

Why we’re refreshing the editorial style guide

Our Digital Content Style Guide intern, Hannah Watson has also written about the results of the survey we conducted to get views on the usage and experience of those who have interacted with the style guide.

An analysis of responses to our editorial style guide survey

In this post, I will focus on the work we’ve done to review and rewrite the pages within the formatting section of the style guide.

We started with the formatting section to bring the guidance in line with our content design training

We’ve recently reworked our Effective Digital Content (EDC) online training course. You can read more about this in our blog series:

Our six-part series on building the Effective Digital Content course

Given the close connection between EDC and the style guide, it was important that both were consistent.

It made sense to start with the formatting section of the style guide as it had pages on headings and links – both of which are key topics of EDC, which we’d done a lot of research on. We felt it would be good to revisit the style guide pages on these topics first, incorporating what we’d recently learnt.

Once these two pages were complete, we then started to work on the wider topics within the formatting section.

Working collaboratively as a team has been crucial to the process

We realised pretty early on in the review process that it wasn’t something that one person in the team could easily do independently.

Our first collaborative writing session highlighted just how much we all benefited from sharing ideas and discussing how best to approach potential changes. We found working on a shared document (live editing as we went) was much more efficient than each working on individual drafts. Therefore, we adopted this approach going forward.

A prototype style guide site enabled us to visualise changes and try out different layouts

We created a prototype style guide site which allowed us to mock up how the new pages would look when implemented on the style guide website.

The prototype was really useful to evaluate different design choices in a more realistic way than Word documents allowed for. It also provided a better way to assess how effective the page was during usability tests.

Continuous usability testing has provided invaluable insights

From the outset of our review process we were keen to involve members of the community that would be using the style guide. We did this by arranging multiple usability tests with willing volunteers over Teams, using the prototype style guide site.

These calls were invaluable to test out our ideas and check the usability of newly formulated pages. It also gave us the opportunity to hear about participants’ experiences of using the current style guide, including areas/rules they felt were hard to understand or implement and gaps where guidance was lacking.

These insights helped us to evolve and improve our content to make sure that it was meeting the needs of the style guide users.

We’ve added in more practical examples

One clear insight we gained from usability testing and also the survey results was that more practical examples would be helpful. We kept this in mind as we went through our review and have expanded the number of examples, as well as improving existing ones. We’ve also clearly signposted the examples on the pages to allow for quick reference.  Hopefully this will help people to more easily understand the style guide principles and see how to apply them in practice.

Creating a change log ensured we had a record of each change and why we made it

We wanted to ensure we kept a track of the changes as well as the reasons behind the decisions we made so we had a record to refer back to.

The process of creating this document involved reviewing each page and evaluating what we had changed and why. It was a useful exercise which entailed quite a critical evaluation of our work as we had to explain the choices behind each design and content change decision.

We categorised the updates within the change log to make them easier to reference and also included a section for the Editorial Working Group to write comments and feedback.

The process has been time consuming but rewarding

We’ve dedicated a lot of time to working on each of the style guide pages we’ve tackled so far, to hopefully create an informative resource for users. We’ve had to consider how to explain often inherently complicated grammatical rules in simple terms, account for nuances, identify edge cases and provide well thought through examples.

The reward has come when we test the new versions with web publishers and receive positive feedback. Often this can be after multiple iterations of the page, but we’ve seen a few ‘ah ha’ moments when people who had been unsure about a particular aspect, now have a better understanding of how to apply one of the rules, or have commented that the guidance is clearer.

The process has also helped us to deepen our knowledge and understanding of writing styles, editorial practices and practical application of grammatical rules and conventions.

Next steps

We’ve recently published the updated style guide pages on headings and links.

Headings and page titles 

Links

We’ve also been rewriting and testing the new versions of the other pages in the formatting section which we hope will be published shortly.

How you can get involved in shaping the new style guide

We are always on the look out for willing volunteers to test out new versions of style guide pages. If you would like to get involved, please get in touch with the User Experience Service: user-experience@ed.ac.uk