In this post, User Experience team intern Hannah Watson shares her work over the summer researching digital content accessibility with the EdWeb 2 publishing community.

Introduction

As part of my internship with the User Experience Service, I have been investigating digital accessibility at the content level across University web pages, particularly on EdWeb 2 sites. Digital accessibility at the content level is about applying principles of accessibility to how web content is written and formatted. This includes, but is not limited to, content features such as heading levels, links, and alt text. It does not include anything that is not involved with content design or that is controlled at a higher level by the Content Management System (CMS), such as font, font size, or colour contrast.

Research aims and scope

The specific research questions for this project were:

• How do web publishers learn about digital content accessibility?
• What do web publishers know about digital content accessibility?
• How do web publishers implement digital accessibility requirements and principles in their content?
• What challenges do web publishers face in creating digitally accessible content?

More comprehensively, I was investigating the accessibility of:

• Heading levels
  • Ensuring that heading levels are used correctly
  • Not using heading levels for emphasis
• Links
  • Clear and concise link text which describes the linked destination
  • Link text which makes sense on its own
  • Avoiding URLs on web pages
• Lists
• Alt text
  • Clear link text that describes the image
• Images
  • Ensuring that all images have appropriate alt text
  • Avoiding images of text
• Videos
  • Including human-corrected captions with any videos uploaded to web pages
  • Making sure that transcripts are available for all videos uploaded to web pages
• Italic, bold, and underlined text

For more detailed guidance on these topics, please refer to the University of Edinburgh editorial style guide.

Editorial style guide | Information Services

This research has been necessary for the User Experience team as it allows us to identify which areas of content accessibility are challenging for web publishers. From this, the team can adapt guidance and training to provide extra support on these more challenging areas where possible.

Research methods

Interviews with web publishers

I started my research by setting up short, informal interviews with six University web publishers. In these interviews, I asked the publishers about their experiences of creating digitally accessible content. The aim of these conversations was to understand how publishers learned about digital accessibility and what challenges they face when making content as accessible as it can be. During the interviews, we referred to web pages that these publishers work on to get concrete examples that illustrate the topics we discussed. Through these interviews, I was able to identify a number of trends, particularly in the challenges that the interviewees and their colleagues face.

Survey of EdWeb 2 publishers and the Web Accessibility Special Interest Group

Following these interviews, I created a survey to further investigate the findings and collate more supporting evidence for these findings. The survey consisted of 10 questions, three of which were demographic based as a filter, with a final question asking permission to follow up with those who responded.

The other six questions asked about:

• which actions the participants took to make their content digitally accessible
• what resources they used to do so
• what challenges they face in doing so

The findings from the survey were effective in making the information gathered in interviews more robust and provided further evidence for some trends that were identified previously.

To publicise this survey, I sent a brief statement explaining my research into two Teams channels, the Web Accessibility Special Interest Group and the EdWeb 2 Community. Overall, the survey received five responses, and while this is a limited number, I found that it helped to support the findings from the interviews.

Analysis of Effective Digital Content workbooks

The final method of research that I used to learn about the digital accessibility of content on University web pages was by looking at pages that were submitted within Effective Digital Content workbooks as part of the course. The course requires learners to choose pages from a University website and assess the effectiveness of the content. By looking at the pages that learners selected, I was able to use active examples and make note of content accessibility issues that were present on live pages. This process also highlighted a number of trends.

This method of research was also useful in that it provided two separate sources of data. Firstly, the answers in the workbook helped me to gauge learners’ understanding of the principles covered in the course. Secondly, the web pages linked by those taking the course allowed me to have live examples of content to assess against content accessibility principles. While there was not necessarily overlap between the answers in the workbook and the pages submitted as part of the workbook (as some people may not have been fully or at all responsible for the content on those pages, or the content could have been updated since the workbook was submitted), it was useful to see these things separately.

Findings about accessibility

Combining findings from all areas of research for this project, I have identified a number of trends in the accessibility of digital content.

Headings, alt text, and links are the principles most often put into practice by participants

In the interviews and the survey, participants were asked what principles of accessible digital content they actively used when designing content. More than half of participants mentioned three principles in particular, with all participants mentioning at least two, which were:

• using the correct heading levels
• adding meaningful alt text to an image
• writing clear and descriptive link text

Interestingly, while these principles were mentioned frequently by participants, and evidenced by the websites that we discussed in interviews, they are also principles that are often missed on University web pages. This is discussed in more detail in the corresponding sections further on in this post.

PDFs are hard to avoid

One standout finding from the interviews was that web publishers sometimes struggle to find an effective alternative to PDFs. While PDFs are not necessarily accessible, they do have benefits which make them useful for publishers. For example, they are downloadable, searchable, and cannot be easily edited without permission from the owner. There are ways to make PDFs more accessible, such as avoiding decorative images, adhering to accessible content design principles within the PDF, and checking colour contrast. However, the interviewees were more in favour of finding a way to turn their content into a webpage as this is more likely to result in accessible content.

Out of the survey responses, three also mentioned that they had recently chosen to publish content as a web page rather than as a PDF, highlighting their knowledge that a web page is preferable in terms of accessibility. However, their personal preferences or how difficult they found this is unknown as I was unable to follow up with these participants.

Heading levels are often skipped and headings vague

Across web pages that I assessed for correct heading levels, there were several which skipped heading levels throughout the page content, such as going straight to a heading 3 without that heading being nested within a heading 2 section. Additionally, headings on the University web pages that I investigated were often generic, instead of being specific about what a page or section will contain, which is the recommended approach.

The fact that the web publishers who were interviewed and surveyed were aware of the importance of correct headings levels and specific headings, and that the majority of these publishers have attended a staff training or used the editorial style guide, suggests that the guidance provided is accurate and useful for publishers.

To increase the use of correct heading levels, as well as clear and descriptive headings on web pages, participant responses suggest that increasing the reach and engagement of existing training and resources involving headings would be effective. This includes training provided by the User Experience Service, such as Effective Digital Content or Content Improvement Club, and the University of Edinburgh editorial style guide.

Alt text is well written but sometimes missed

In three of the interviews, and in two survey responses, participants mentioned that they struggled to find the time to add alt text to images on their web pages. However, participants in the interviews also stated that they understood the importance of alt text, and what writing meaningful and clear alt text involves. This is reflected in the answers in Effective Digital Content workbooks. The course contains a question asking learners to write meaningful alt text for two images, and this question is often answered well. This suggests that web publishers understand how to write alt text, and that the obstacle in doing so is more likely to be related to time and resource.

One way that time constraints on adding alt text could be improved is to reduce the number of images on a web page, which will not only make this task more manageable but also is also more sustainable.

Explaining acronyms and abbreviations is common

All five responses to the survey stated that they had explained an acronym or abbreviation recently. Although this did not come up in the interviews often – only once – the survey responses suggest that this is common practice for web publishers who are familiar with digital accessibility principles.

Link text is frequently inline or not descriptive

Participants stated that they understand the importance of clear link text as a principle and make effort to implement this into their content. However, similar to headings, this sentiment is not reflected across numerous University web pages. In some of the pages submitted as part of the Effective Digital Content workbooks that I investigated, there were frequent occurrences of inline link text, or link text that does not clearly describe the linked destination.

To increase the writing of link text on a separate line, as well as clear and descriptive link text, participant responses suggest that increasing the reach and engagement of existing training and resources involving links would be effective. This includes training provided by the User Experience Service, such as Effective Digital Content or Content Improvement Club, and the University of Edinburgh editorial style guide.

Findings about staff experience and engagement

A trend from both the interviews and survey responses is that for many of the people involved with this research, their knowledge of digital accessibility started with a personal interest. Specific examples of this that participants mentioned include learning about accessibility as a student (and then going on to be an accessibility advocate for a student society) and working with disabled students and learning through experience.

During the interviews, multiple staff members mentioned that they believe, through their experiences, that a large part of issues with creating accessible digital content at the University surrounds communication. A combination of factors was discussed that had communication at the centre, including:

• the importance of digital accessibility not being widespread enough.
• consistency about expectations between schools or areas of the University, such as one page being edited by multiple schools or areas and having different standards.

Job-based constraints were also mentioned frequently, such as limited time to add alt text to all images on a web page and working on a page where the lead publisher takes a design forward approach which can sometimes clash with accessible content principles. These answers were also reflected in the survey responses, with all of the responses mentioning either one or both of these problems.

What resources do web publishers use for learning about and developing their digital accessibility skills?

The primary resource that participants mentioned using to learn about digital accessibility and develop their skills was University-provided staff training, with 10 of 11 participants mentioning this. Effective Digital Content was specifically mentioned twice, and Content Improvement Club three times. In the interviews, two participants mentioned more general staff training, with one survey response saying the same. In the survey responses, three participants also said that they used training provided by the Disability Information Team.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 (WCAG) is another resource that was frequently mentioned by participants, with six in total saying that this is a resource that they use as guidance on accessibility.

The University of Edinburgh editorial style guide was mentioned by five participants as a resource that they used to provide guidance on digital accessibility, in which the guidance reflects what publishers learn in training courses, meaning that information they take from the style guide is in line with accessibility and content design training.

What I learned from researching content accessibility approaches in EdWeb

I learned a lot during my time researching how web publishers at the University of Edinburgh approach creating accessible digital content. I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to work with staff from a variety of different areas of the University. This helped me to learn how to identify commonalities in interview and survey responses despite the areas of work being distinct. I also enjoyed this because I was able to learn much more about the work that goes on across the University and what the work of other teams involved.

I also particularly enjoyed the format of my internship being a combination of individual work and working with other members of my team and the Disability Information team. This balance allowed me to set my own goals while still getting the opportunity to work and learn collaboratively as part of a team, prioritising my tasks between my own and those that I was working on with others.

A limitation of my work was that it was much easier to contact and work with staff who have a genuine interest in the subject area of accessibility, which does not lead to research that is representative of how University staff approach digital accessibility as a whole. Having done the research that I have so far, a continuation of the research would be most beneficial if it focused on the experiences and approaches of staff who are less familiar with digital accessibility requirements and principles, as this would create a more well-rounded understanding of web publisher accessibility approaches at the content level.

Furthermore, another limitation of the work was the time constraints which have restricted my ability to develop solutions to issues identified during the research period. This was expected to a degree, as the solutions depended on the outcomes of the research, which has taken the majority of the 12-week period. The positive outcome of this is that the research and findings will provide the User Experience service with information that allows for both further research and for adaptations to guidance and training if it is deemed necessary.

Conclusion

This research has helped the User Experience Service to assess their training and the resources that are available for publishers to learn more about digital content accessibility. Keeping in touch with the publishing community through projects like this helps the team to direct their effort to real challenges that publishers face on a day to day basis.

The research completed throughout the duration of this project will be supported and advanced by further investigation, particularly by communicating with web publishers who are less involved with digital accessibility as a whole. This will likely help in providing more concrete solutions to digital content accessibility issues across EdWeb 2 pages.

In June, I headed over to the Nucleus Building to attend the University’s Learning and Teaching Conference. The theme of the conference was student voice, and I was there to present about how the Careers Service and the UX Service had involved students in the design process for a recent website development project.

Emily McIntosh’s keynote “Nothing about us without us”

The day kicked off with a keynote from Emily McIntosh, Chief Student Officer at Harper Adams University. Emily set up the theme of student voice and covered some important distinctions for us to keep in mind throughout the day. Emily compared two ways that students are involved in decision-making processes: representation and partnership.

Representation is where staff within a university create something – a new policy, for example – then show student reps and ask for their opinion. While this is better than not involving students at all, it can lead to student reps feeling that they are responding to decisions that have already been made. The input from student reps sometimes comes at late stage, and can lead to tweaks but not necessarily substantive change.

Emily suggested that “you said, we did” posters can be indicative of this sort of approach. She contrasted this with examples of universities working in partnership with students from the beginning. In this way, students are actively involved in helping to shape services and policy. Emily described this as a relational, dialogic culture of ongoing collaboration, where students and staff work on problems together. This approach is sometimes described as co-design.

For me, there were some clear analogies in what Emily was describing to processes we advocate for in user-centred design. For example, bringing user input into the early stages of a design process is generally more effective than getting the same input later in the day. In addition to this, user-centred design often emphasises the benefit of ongoing collaboration and continuous iterative improvement, keeping users involved before and after the launch of a product.

Working in partnership like this is not necessarily a simple thing to achieve. But I appreciated the message: incorporating students into how we decide to do things as a university brings some significant advantages. Whatever the practical challenges of implementing this approach, moving from designing-for to designing-with offers us opportunities to better meet service users’ needs.

Highlights from the rest of the day

The rest of the day made me think about issues around student voice.

Neil Speirs (Widening Participation Manager) raised the issue of working class students often being absent from student voice projects. Neil’s talk made me think about how good quality user research often depends on recruiting a diverse group of participants. Recruiting the right research participants can be difficult. We see that all the time in our work. But without a diverse range of voices, user research can miss important perspectives and draw an incomplete picture of what matters to users of a product or service.

Clare McKay (Student Recruitment and Admissions) and Christine Emmerson (Communications and Marketing) talked about how student recruitment markets can help us to anticipate student needs. One important point they made was that marketing is not just about promoting courses and programmes. It’s also about understanding our audience and whether there is a need. This resonated with aspects of UX work, where an understanding of user needs can tell us not just how to communicate information, but also whether that information is needed in the first place.

Jenna Fyfe and Carine Abraham (Edinburgh Medical School) talked about research they had done with alumni networks. Their project focused on alumni from three online postgraduate programmes at the Medical School. Alumni described how they create networks with each other following graduation, and how they often retain an interest in maintaining contact with programme teams from the University. This contrasts with a picture where alumni wish to maintain contact with university-wide structures. I found this interesting, because we sometimes think of people outside the University seeing us as a single entity unified by an overarching brand. In contrast, the alumni in this research weren’t thinking about a monolithic institution. Instead, they retained an interest in personal connections with a small, specific part of the University.

My talk was about our work with the Careers Service

In my talk, I gave an overview of how the Careers Service developed their website in 2025. In particular, I highlighted how the User Experience Service assisted with the design of collaborative activities that brought student voice into the work. I wanted to show how bringing student input into this sort of design activity makes the work better, and I talked about the benefits that the Careers Service achieved by approaching the project in this way.

You can read more about our collaboration with the Careers Service elsewhere on this blog:

Blog posts about work by the UX Service and the Careers Service

Reflections on the day

I thought there was a lot of value in holding a conference like this, with most of the speakers being staff and students from the University of Edinburgh. Presenters were speaking from a broadly similar context, which meant the talks had a high level of relevance to our work. There were a lot of familiar faces and it was good to catch up in the breaks with colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while.

My main takeaway was that student voice projects often have a lot of crossover with user-centred design approaches. In both cases, we’re interested in making things better by involving end users. I felt it was a great opportunity to hear about how student voice projects have been informing colleagues’ work at the University.

About the conference

University of Edinburgh Learning & Teaching Conference

UX Scotland is an annual two-day conference for people working in user-centred design. This year, I went along to the John McIntyre Centre to hear about the latest developments in UX. In this post, I’ll write about my highlights from the conference.

Object-oriented UX in action: rebuilding a public sector website with structured content

The challenge: dividing up content and naming groupings

Out of all the talks I saw, this was the one that I found the most interesting. Joey Gartin, a content designer at Renfrewshire Council, told a story about a multiyear project to redesign the council’s website. It started with a familiar situation: the council had a large website that people found confusing and hard to use. Users couldn’t find things, and when they could, it wasn’t always easy to understand.

Renfrewshire Council needed to work out a better way to divide up and group the content on their website. Then they needed to name those groups in a way that made sense to people.

I enjoyed hearing about this because this is one of those problems that never seems to go away. When we work with digital content, whether that’s designing a homepage or tidying up a shared set of folders and files, we’re constantly looking for ways to group things. Then we’re also constantly looking for names for those groups that will make sense to people.

OOUX involves favouring nouns over verbs

Renfrewshire Council approached the problem using methods from Object-Oriented User Experience (OOUX). This is an approach to digital product design that focuses on establishing the things (or ‘objects’) that matter to your users. The approach emphasises the importance of working out the nouns involved in your service before you move on to the verbs. I’d read a bit about it a while ago on Duncan Stephen’s blog:

Duncan Stephen writes about how the Scottish Government have used OOUX approaches

The argument in favour of focusing on nouns is that this approach is more closely aligned to how people think. When you walk around a supermarket, you have a shopping list of objects. To reflect this, a supermarket is typically organised into sections that reflect broader groupings of those objects: Fruit, Vegetables, Pasta, Cake, and so on.

In a similar way – the theory goes – people often approach websites with a list of nouns in mind. They are therefore scanning webpages for keywords that match these nouns.

But many council websites use a hybrid of verb-based groupings and noun-based groupings. So you get sections called Pay, Apply, Report and Request forming a core part of their information architecture. Here are two examples.

The City of Edinburgh Council:

West Lothian Council:

 

Renfrewshire have not adopted this model. While their page titles often start with verbs, the groupings for these pages overwhelmingly use nouns:

Renfrewshire Council

Joey cited the City of Sydney as another public body using this approach:

City of Sydney

OOUX helped Renfrewshire Council to create templates

With your objects figured out, the next step of an OOUX approach is to work out:

• the relationships between objects
• the calls to action that objects offer users
• the attributes that make up objects

Joey talked us through this work. He also talked about how Renfrewshire Council used this as a foundation to create templated designs for common page types.

For example, take these two pages, both categorised as ‘service requests’:

• Report a housing repair (Renfrewshire Council)
• Graffiti (Renfrewshire Council)

Because they’re both service requests, you can see common sections on both pages.

For example, on the ‘Report a housing repair’ page, you have sections called:

• Before you report a repair
• How to report a repair

And on the ‘Graffiti’ page, you have:

• Before you report it
• How to report it

Joey showed us how this works behind the scenes. Renfrewshire Council use custom content types in Drupal to help structure the content writing process. So if you’re a content editor writing a service request page, you’ll be prompted to add a section on ‘Before you report it’. This helps content writers know what they need to include in a page. It also brings consistency to the website, which ultimately benefits users.

My reflections on how templates could work at Edinburgh

At Edinburgh, we use content types in our Drupal-based CMS EdWeb to create News and Event pages. So it was interesting to see another public sector website using a more extensive set of content types in Drupal. It made me reflect on how this approach might work for us. The context is so different: at Renfrewshire, it sounded like they had a more centralised approach to content management. The bulk of Edinburgh’s content publishing model is more devolved, which makes templated approaches to content more challenging. But there are clearly benefits available when you can make it work.

So lots to chew on from this talk, and it was a fun presentation to boot.

Other highlights

Sara Wachter-Boettcher on burnout

Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s keynote, “You don’t need more grit: breaking the burnout cycle in UX” was a run through of how and why burnout affects designers working in tech. It was a useful reminder to appreciate the limits of our influence within an organisation, and to be careful not to attach too much of ourselves to our job. It was cool seeing Sara in person. Her book Content Everywhere was one of the first things I read when I started in my role, and I thought it was really good.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Craig Abbott on AI and accessibility

Craig Abbott spoke about the risks and opportunities of using large language models for website design and fixing accessibility issues. One point that stood out was that LLMs are trained on some pretty ropey data. WebAIM estimate that 95% of the top million websites have detectable WCAG 2.2 failures, and these are the kinds of site that LLMs are trained on. So if you ask an AI to create a website, it will often produce something that superficially looks ok but is packed with accessibility problems.

The WebAIM Million: The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages

Craig showed us an example of a website he’d quickly created with AI and talked through the accessibility problems. He also showed us his other experiments. He’d had inconsistent results using AI to detect heading level failures or write alt text that took the context of an image into account. But he’d had some successes with using AI to complete more technical tasks with testable results.

Craig Abbott

James Chudley on digital sustainability

James Chudley presented on bringing sustainability practices into digital design. The highlight for me was seeing his experiments with visualising page weight across a website. Taking inspiration from an infographic using colour bars to illustrate rising global temperatures, James had applied a similar idea to visualising where a website is using more energy-intensive design choices.

James has posted his slides here:

James Chudley: Presenting ‘Beyond human centred design’ at UX Scotland

Another great conference

UX Scotland was a good chance to hear from some leading lights in the field, catch up with people and hear about some case studies that are relevant to us at Edinburgh. The two days were well organised and it gave me a lot to think about as we continue to support UX and content work at the University.

UX Scotland

In our May Content Improvement Club session, we focused on how to run a usability test. We ran through the basics of putting a script together, watched a clip from a test and had a go at prioritising some issues.

Two problems for people working with content

We started this session by outlining two problems for people working with content.

We don’t see people using our websites

The first problem is that we don’t typically see people using the things we create. We build a website based on our best assumptions of what our users need and how we think they will interact with it. Then at some point in the future, someone uses the site. They might find it easy to use. They might find it difficult. But we don’t know, because we don’t get to see.

It’s hard to self-assess our own website

The second problem is that it’s hard to self-assess a website that we’re already familiar with. When we look at the site, we bring our understanding of the structure and the context it sits in. We know what the acronyms mean. We know where to find the contact form. We know where the links go.

This isn’t necessarily the case for a user coming to the site for the first time.

Here’s Steve Krug, author of Rocket Surgery Made Easy:

“If you’re building something, you’re not going to be able to see where it’s going to confuse people. It’s not going to confuse you. You know too much about it.”​

Steve Krug interviewed on the Brave UX podcast

This is sometimes known as the ‘curse of knowledge’. Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research, explains:

Whenever we learn things, we forget what it’s like not to know those things. […] The more you know, the more you expect other people to know. And if you become a real expert in a topic, forget it.

Erika Hall writing in the Mule Design Studio newsletter: Don’t chicken out about talking to people

Usability testing is a way of addressing these problems. It gives us a chance to see what it’s like for someone visiting our site for the first time and it counteracts the curse of knowledge. That gives us valuable insight into where a design is working and where it isn’t.

A quick definition of usability

Before we go any further, a quick word about what we mean by ‘usability’.

In short, usability refers to how easy, effective and satisfying something is to use.​

The cover of Don Norman’s book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ features a coffeepot with a spout and handle on the same side. This would score poorly in a usability test as it wouldn’t be easy, effective or satisfying to use.

ISO definition

There’s also an international standard (ISO 9241-11) definition of usability:​

“The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use.”​

ISO definition of usability

This is a more technical definition, but it’s worth bearing in mind. It emphasises the fact that we need to think about specified users and their goals. That will come up when we get to writing our script.

A simple usability test

The simplest usability test you can do takes about 5 minutes:

1. Grab a colleague / friend / family member who doesn’t know your site​.
2. Sit them at a computer and open the homepage of your site.
3. Set them a task. For example: “Imagine you’re a student and you want to get a replacement student card”.​
4. Sit quietly and watch as they try to complete the task.

This doesn’t take much effort, and sometimes you uncover a usability issue or two.

In Content Improvement Club, we looked at how to run a more extensive usability test. But we wanted attendees to know from the outset that usability testing doesn’t have to be a big complicated process. It can still be beneficial even if you do it on a small scale.

There are three roles in every test

In a usability test, there are three roles:

• A moderator, who reads the script, sets tasks for the participant and asks questions​.
• A participant​, who completes tasks on a website​, thinking out loud​ as they do so.
• An observer​, who watches and takes notes​.

There can be any number of observers, who watch the test live or on a recording.

We watched an example of a usability test

The best way to understand how a usability test works is to watch a recording of one.

Here’s Steve Krug demonstrating how he runs a test:

Usability Test Demo by Steve Krug (YouTube video, 24 minutes)

In Content Improvement Club, we watched a short clip of someone completing a task on a library website at a UK university.

This was the task:

You’re working on a presentation with four other people from your course. You need to find a study room in the library for the four of you this weekend. Can you find out if a suitable study room is available at the library?

We noted down the issues that we saw, and then we shared them on a Microsoft Whiteboard. Even though it was a single task, there were a lot of issues, which is fairly typical. That’s why it’s often helpful to follow your observations with a prioritisation exercise.

We prioritised the issues

In the session, we demonstrated how you can prioritise issues using a matrix like this:

To place things on the matrix, you make a quick assessment of how significant the issue is. Then you assess how easy it would be to fix. The issues you typically want to focus on first are those in the top right quadrant: major issues that are easy to fix.

It can be helpful to have a set of questions to establish whether an issue is major or minor.

These are adapted from Dave Travis’s work on Red Route usability testing:

• Does the problem occur in a task that is highly important to you or your users?
• Is the problem difficult for users to overcome?​
• Did multiple participants experience the same problem?

Red route usability: The key user journeys with your web site (Dave Travis / archive.org)

Using questions like these give you a shared set of criteria when assessing the significance of usability issues in a group.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. How did we get to this point?

How to write a script

Before you can run a series of tests, you need a script.

Use a template

We shared our usability testing script template, which draws on the work of Steve Krug:

Research brief and usability testing script (DOCX, 51KB)

The template includes:

• a brief, where you articulate the goals of the testing
• a lead-in script, which you read to participants before testing begins. This covers what the session will involve and sets expectations. ​
• a set of tasks, presented in a table with two columns. One column contains the task, and another the expected path to complete the task.​

Come up with tasks

We start by identifying tasks and then develop them by adding a scenario.

We practised this in the session. Attendees suggested tasks that someone might need to carry out on a university library website. For example:

• Check opening times
• Find a book on your reading list

Develop tasks by adding scenarios

Next, attendees developed these tasks by adding a scenario.

For example, “Check opening times” becomes:

• You’re a student and you want to check the opening times of the library during the winter break. How would you go about doing this?

“Find a book on your reading list” becomes:

• You’re a new student and you want to find the book “Campbell’s Biology”, which is on the reading list for your course. Can you show me how you would find out if the library has a copy of this book?

Tips for writing good tasks and scenarios

We shared some tips for turning tasks into questions​:

• Aim for 5 to 10 scenarios per session.​
• Keep tasks focused: one goal per task.​
• Frame tasks as realistic scenarios, not instructions.​
• Add light context to make it realistic.​

We recommend running a pilot usability test before going ahead with a round of testing. This helps you see how the full usability test flows from start to finish. ​It also gives you a chance to refine the script and ​ensures the session runs smoothly for participants on the day.​

Logistics

Ahead of the Content Improvement Club session, we asked attendees if they wanted us to cover any topics in particular. Most of these came under the wider topic of logistics.

When should you test in a design process?​

Test earlier rather than later. Testing earlier in a design process is ideal because it’s easier to make changes based on what you learn. If you’re creating something new, this usually involves creating rough drafts or prototypes, and then later, a high-fidelity version.

Changing a prototype is easy because no one is very attached to it. But when a design is a later stage of development, it tends to be more painful to learn that something isn’t working. By this point, you and your colleagues have usually invested a significant amount of time in an idea. If the fix involves changing something fundamental to the product, you might have to undo work that’s already been done.​

How long does a testing session take?

It varies, but we usually run testing sessions of about 30 minutes.

How many tasks do you set?

In 30 minutes, we can usually fit in between 5 and 10 tasks.

How many participants do you need?

Three to five participants is a good target. Jakob Nielsen argued that five participants is enough for one round of tests. This is because when you run the same tests with multiple people, you tend to see the same usability issues reoccurring. It’s a case of diminishing returns: by test number six, you aren’t usually learning anything new.

Why you only need to test with five users (Nielsen Norman Group)​

In Rocket Surgery Made Easy, Steve Krug recommends three participants per round of testing. This way you can run more rounds of tests – for example, by testing an initial idea and then a later iteration of the same design.

How do you recruit participants?

Mailing lists, Teams channels and surveys are great places to put call outs. We advise that you avoid revealing the testing topic or content in advance.​

Aim for participants who reflect real users where possible. This can prove difficult, so don’t let it stop you if you can’t find participants who don’t match the profile of your users.

How do you take notes?

Obviously, you can scribble notes anywhere you like. When we’re running a series of tests, we often take notes in a spreadsheet. This allows us to quickly spot which tasks caused problems for multiple participants.

Usability test results spreadsheet (XSLX, 36KB)

How can we make testing more accessible and inclusive?

Accessibility and inclusivity should be considered from the very start of the testing process. One important step is asking participants early on whether they use any assistive technology, so you can understand their setup and make any necessary arrangements. Our own introduction questions and templates include this for that reason. In the template, this is an introductory question, but if you’re recruiting via a survey, you could mention this there.​

​Having a diverse participant group will usually lead to more useful and representative findings. For example, if you’re testing a student-facing service, including both undergraduate and postgraduate students can help capture a wider range of experiences and needs. Again, this can sometimes be a challenge, but if possible something to aim for.​

Ideally, usability testing should include participants who regularly use assistive technologies. This provides valuable insight into accessibility barriers that might otherwise be missed. However, this can sometimes be challenging due to recruitment costs, specialist panels, or limited budgets.

Some resources that can help:

• Deque: Considering accessibility when designing a usability test ​
• Scottish Government Service Manual: Usability testing with disabled and non-disabled people​

Acting on the findings​

So you’ve run a round of testing. What happens next?

Involve senior colleagues in playbacks

In 2015, Caroline Jarrett wrote about a phenomenon she and Steve Krug had noticed when working on websites. They would run a set of tests on a website and uncover some usability problems. But then six months later, the problems were still there: no one had gone in and fixed them. To investigate why this was happening, they ran a survey of UX professionals.

Caroline Jarrett and Steve Krug’s analysis of why usability problems go unfixed

Out of 131 responses, the most common reason was that findings from usability testing conflicted with a decision maker’s opinion.

One way to address this is to get decision makers in the room (or on the Teams call) when you watch a highlights reel of test recordings. There really is no substitute for seeing user behaviour first hand. Reading about it in a report doesn’t carry the same weight.

Use the momentum created by testing

Testing creates a shared motivation to fix things​. Use this to your advantage. If you can, take action to fix usability problems while people’s memories are fresh​.

Make small changes first

Sometimes usability testing highlights small problems that are easily fixed. A link that doesn’t go where someone expects it to. An item missing from an A-Z.

Sort these things out first. Small wins like this give you the motivation to sort out the knottier problems.

If you want to find out more

This was a quick introduction to running your own tests. If you want to learn more,  Steve Krug’s introductory guide is a great place to start:

Rocket Surgery Made Easy by Steve Krug (listing on DiscoverEd)

We post about case studies of usability testing at the University on this blog:

• How usability testing guided user-centred improvements of the Digital Collections Platform (Emma Horrell)
• How usability testing helped the Library to improve their website (Nick Daniels)

The Prospective Student Web Team do the same:

• Usability testing the display of multiple entry years in the undergraduate degree finder (Pete Watson)
• Usability testing of new programme search and page navigation features (Nicole Tweedie)

Acknowledgements

Various points made in this blog post are taken from this 2015 post by Neil Allison:

Making usability testing agile

How to hear about future sessions

We promote these sessions via our mailing list. If you’re interested, please sign up:

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

Suggest a topic for a future session

We picked usability testing following a suggestion from the community. We’re keen to continue covering topics that colleagues across the University would find useful. 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 (University login required)

Other training that we offer

More training is listed on the User Experience Service website:

Training | User Experience Service

In our February session of Content Improvement Club, publishers from across the University met up and worked together on pages from their sites. In this session, we focused on five simple things that we can all do when checking over our content.

About the session

Content Improvement Club is our monthly meet-up for web publishers. In February, publishers brought along a page from one of their sites and worked on it in collaboration with colleagues from other parts of the University. In the session, we used a checklist to cover five things that are useful to look at when working on a piece of content.

Five things on the checklist

This is what was on the checklist:

1. Check how it displays on a mobile
2. Make it easy to scan
3. Check the links
4. Use images effectively
5. Keep it up to date

1. Check how it displays on a mobile

Most publishing work happens on desktops or laptops, so it’s natural that we focus on how our sites display on larger screens. However, it’s always worth checking how your site displays on a mobile.

One way to check this is using the developer tools in your browser:

Google Chrome: Simulate mobile devices with device mode

Microsoft Edge: Emulate mobile devices

In the session, we loaded our pages in mobile view and checked how they were displaying. In most cases, the content management system took care of everything.

One thing that took us by surprise was SharePoint cutting link text short in a call to action web part. Here’s how that looks in desktop – the green bit is a clickable button:

But here’s how that same button looks on mobile:

So this is something worth considering if you use a call to action in SharePoint.

2. Make it easy to scan

Most web users aren’t reading every word. Instead, they skim through content to get the gist of it, and scan through it to find a particular bit of information. We can make our sites easier to use by designing the content for this behaviour.

In this session, we looked at three ways to do this.

First, chunk it up. Look for large blocks of paragraph text and see if you can break them into smaller paragraphs.

Second, use headings to signal to users what each section of the page is about.

Third, use bullet points to make lists of items easier to read.

Guidance on headings and lists in the editorial style guide

Because the session was about quick wins, we just did these three checks and moved on. But if you have more time, there are other things you can do to make content easier to scan:

• Cut excess content – anything irrelevant, waffly or out of date.
• Write in plain language.
• Put the best bit first.

See our write-up from a previous Content Improvement Club for more on this:

Editing that works – what we covered in our September Content Improvement Club session

3. Check the links

In our content, we’re aiming for meaningful link text that helps users predict what will happen when they follow the link. To work with assistive technology, the link text needs to make sense on its own.

Common errors include:

• using a web address as link text, like ‘https://www.ed.ac.uk’
• using vague link text, like ‘click here’

At the University, we usually add links just below the relevant paragraph, putting the link on its own line.

Guidance on links in the editorial style guide

In the session, we checked through the links on the pages we’d brought along.

There was some discussion about situations where putting links on a new line doesn’t work so well. For example, one attendee shared a page that consisted of a long list of academic references. In this instance, it seemed like keeping the links in-line made more sense than repeating each one below the references.

We also talked about why we follow the practice of putting links on a new line at the University. It’s been in our guidance for a long time – the earliest reference I’ve seen is in a PDF from 2010 called the ‘Polopoly Elements Guidance’.  Polopoly was the central content management system at the University before EdWeb.

The main reasons we put links on their own line are:

• It makes links easier to find – inline links can become buried within a paragraph of text.
• It makes it easier to write link text that makes sense on its own – this helps us to write accessible, usable link text.

4. Use images effectively

Images play an important role in communicating with our audiences. But sometimes we add images to a page when they don’t serve much of a purpose.

In the session, we considered what role our images were playing and whether they were necessary for the page to do its job.

We also discussed the sustainability benefits of reducing the number of images on our web estate. Images add to the weight of a page, increasing the amount of data being transferred when users load the page.

Finally, we checked whether any images on our pages had been uploaded with appropriate alt text.

5. Keep it up to date

We gave our pages a quick check for any information that was out of date. We also looked for information that was likely to go out of date.

In groups, we discussed the various strategies we use across the University to maintain the accuracy of our content.

Some strategies that attendees mentioned were:

• setting calendar reminders to check in on certain pages
• keeping in touch with colleagues in Human Resources to ensure that staff listing pages are up to date

Our next Content Improvement Club

In our next session, the topic we’re covering is:

Using headings and links to make your content more accessible

The session will cover some of the topics discussed here, but with more of a focus on accessibility considerations.

Date: Tuesday 24 March 2026

Time: 2pm to 3pm

Place: Online only (Microsoft Teams)

Content Improvement Club: 24 March session

How to hear about future sessions

We promote these sessions via our mailing list. If you’re interested, please sign up:

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

Suggest a topic for a future session

We’re keen to continue covering topics that colleagues across the University would find useful. 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 (University login required)

Other training that we offer

More training is listed on the User Experience Service website:

Training | User Experience Service

 

The User Experience Service worked with colleagues from the Library to assist with their content development work. In this post, we’ll summarise what this collaboration involved and how it helped the Library to improve their site. 

Aims for this work

In Autumn 2025, the Library team got in touch with the UX Service to get help with a project to improve their website.

Library website

Working with the Library, we established that some user research would help us to know what needed to be improved. Through this research, we wanted to:

• find out if users can complete important tasks using the Library website by locating content
• understand if the Library website is easy for users to navigate
• identify any usability issues with the current Library website, which can then be prioritised and resolved
• understand users’ perceptions of the Library website and its purpose
• understand what role the Library website plays in users’ information-seeking behaviour

We agreed that running a short series of usability tests would help to identify where the existing site design was working well and where it could be improved. The testing would also provide an opportunity for staff to talk to students and learn about both their impressions of the site, and the role it plays in helping students to answer queries about library-related topics.

How a usability test works

In a usability test, you ask people to complete tasks on your site while you sit on the sidelines and watch. Participants are asked to share their thought process as they navigate through the site. Sometimes you find that participants can complete the tasks easily and without too much fuss. With other tasks you notice that participants encounter obstacles and have difficulty getting to an answer.

By testing like this with a small number of people, you get an indication of where users might be struggling with your site. This then helps you to identify which elements of your site design you might want to change.

We created tasks for test participants

In this work, the Library wanted to focus on the experience of students using their site. We started by making a list of the tasks that students need to complete. These included tasks like:

• check if a book is overdue
• request a book for an assignment I need to write
• find the opening times for the Main Library

We then worked with the Library team to develop these tasks into scenarios that we could include in a usability test.

Developed into a scenario, the tasks looked like this:

• You need to find a study room in the Main Library for four people to work on a presentation at the weekend. Where would you go to find out if a suitable study room is available at the Main Library?
• There’s a book chapter you need to read for an assignment, but there’s no e-book available, and the only print copy is at the University Collections Facility. One of your friends says that the Library can provide a scan of a book chapter, but you’re not sure how to request one. How would you find out how to request a scan?

With the test script finalised, the Library recruited six student interns working within Information Services to take part in the testing.

Running the tests

The UX team ran a pilot test session with the Library to try out the script and to demonstrate what’s involved with running a usability test. For the rest of the testing, Library staff ran the tests. This upskilled their team in this method of user research, which supports any future testing that they want to carry out on their site.

When running a usability test, Library staff needed to:

• read through the script
• make participants feel at ease
• ask questions where appropriate
• make notes of any usability problems that occurred

It was also important to hold back from helping participants to complete a task. In usability tests, we often find that we learn the most when a task doesn’t go smoothly. So although it can be difficult to watch, it’s useful to see where people get tripped up and work out what might be causing the problem.

The tests took place over Microsoft Teams, with members of the UX team sitting in on the call to make observations of any common themes.

What we found out

When the testing was complete, we all met up to compare notes.

Some of our observations included the following:

• The horizontal navigation menu was an important way for participants to get to the content they wanted. Getting the language right in this section was therefore critical to participants being able to find key content.
• The meaning of some section names such as ‘Academic Support Librarian’ were not sufficiently clear to participants, and this proved to be an obstacle in some tasks.
• Information about laptop loans was difficult to find, with some participants looking for answers in the wrong part of the site.

As a result of the testing, the Library made changes to their site design. These included changes to the menu.

In the tests, the menu looked like this:

After the testing, the Library renamed the ‘Academic Support Librarians’ section to ‘Study Support’. This also addressed an issue where participants were looking in the Research Support section for a task that really called for study support.

In addition to this, the order of the menu items was changed to better align them with the order of cards on the homepage.

The new menu looks like this:

Finding out about how to borrow a laptop was identified as a challenging task to complete. As a result, the Library created a new ‘Laptop loans’ link in the menu to make this service easier to find:

The Library have also noted several other areas of the site that they plan to address at a future date. In particular, the testing uncovered a need to clarify the relationship between location information used in DiscoverEd and corresponding information on the website.

Looking back on the work

We were delighted to hear that the Library team benefited from this collaboration.

Working with your team was such a positive and useful experience. I really appreciated that you were able to steer us through the whole process from writing the scenarios, to doing a test run and providing independent feedback from observing the testing. Not only has it made us look at our web content with new eyes, but we now have a group of experienced UX testers.

– Angela Laurins, Library Learning Services Manager.

The Library is a high-profile site at the University and it was a privilege to help them review their content. We enjoyed collaborating with the team and it was interesting to learn about how students are interacting with EdWeb 2.

Find out more about usability testing

If you would like to learn more about how usability testing can help to inform decisions about your site, get in touch.

Contact the User Experience Service