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

Our June Content Improvement Club session focused on AI. In particular we discussed the changes in search behaviour, how that’s impacting the way people consume content and some of the things you can do to make your content ready for this new search landscape. Attendees also got the chance to work in groups to put some of our top tips into practice.

This topic clearly resonated with with our community, as it was fully booked shortly after being advertised, so we ran a second session to enable more people to attend.

Changes in search behaviour in the wake of AI overviews

We started off the session by providing a bit of context around what has led to the change in the way people now search for information.

AI overviews help answer your question on the search results page itself

In 2024 AI overviews were launched by Google to answer search queries directly on the search results page. AI overviews take snippets of content from relevant webpages (often combining multiple sources) using Google’s existing search index and the same ranking systems as regular search.

Since their introduction, AI overviews have rapidly increased and are now a prominent feature on the majority of search results pages. U.S data from the end of 2025 shows that overviews appear in over 60% of all search queries, doubling from 2024.

New Data: Google AI Overviews Now Appear in 60% of Searches

The information source is attributed using tags, which contain a link to the website itself. However, we are seeing a trend of people finding the information they need and relying on the overview without visiting the website where the information originated. This is known as ‘zero click behaviour’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The rise in ‘zero click behaviour’

The introduction of AI overviews has meant that people have started to become accustomed to getting an instant answer on the search results page. People are more often relying on overviews, rather than clicking a link to a relevant webpage to locate the information themselves. This means fewer people are making it to your webpage and if they do it may well be later on in their search journey.

In Q1 2026 studies report that 65% of searches on Google did not result in a click to anywhere.

Zero-Click Crisis Worsens – SuperPrompt

This figure is predicted to be significantly higher for those using mobile when searching.

Also statistics from 2025 show that 80% of people used answers directly on search pages and 50% relied on AI summaries for answers.

Zero-click searches reshape marketing strategies in 2025

These changes in search behaviour do require you to think a bit differently about the way your content is being used. This is summed up well by Guus Goorts, an education marketing coach, who says:

LLMs [Large Language Models] increasingly visit  your website on your audiences’ behalf.

Ways to make your content ready for AI

In the session we focused on the things that you can do to optimise your content for AI. Hopefully you will be glad to know that much of the evergreen content design advice we provide still stands strong in the face of the new AI search landscape.

Clear, self-contained content gives AI better material to work with

As AI can sometimes take just snippets of your page or grab sentences out of the wider context, one step you can take is to try to make sure that content makes sense even outwith its surrounding context.

The more self-contained and specific your content is, the more likely it is that AI systems will interpret it correctly and present accurate information to users. You can achieve this by avoiding:

• non-specific or generic headings that rely on page context, but do not make sense when lifted off the page – for example ‘Funding’ rather than ‘Postgraduate funding options for international students’
• references to content elsewhere on a page such as ‘see below’ or  ‘as mentioned above’ as AI may retrieve the sentence without the content it refers to
• vague descriptors in the form of unclear or missing subjects such as ‘This must be submitted with your application’ as if the surrounding text is missing, neither the reader nor AI knows what ‘this’ refers to
• videos without transcripts, captions or summaries as AI tools cannot watch video content, they process text far more reliably than video

Answer questions directly and avoid unnecessary preamble or woolly language

AI predicts likely answers from the content it finds. It can potentially miss the answer if it’s buried in long winded sentences, or not clearly explained.

In the session we gave the example of a prospective student asking: “What accommodation does the University offer?”

We provided two example bits of content that the AI could draw from.

Example 1 : ‘Our accommodation includes single rooms, shared flats and accessible housing.’ This contains the answer directly, it names the accommodation types and it can be lifted into an overview without losing meaning.

Example 2: ‘There are lots of options of different accommodation with various numbers of rooms depending on your needs.’ Whilst this sounds friendly it doesn’t provide much useful information. Phases such as ‘lots of options’ and ‘to suit your needs’ take up space without answering the question.

Content that is well structured and accessible is still key

Making sure your content is both well-structured and accessible is still key when we are looking at how AI will use and interpret it.

Frequent, meaningful headings add structure

Headings are one of the main ways people navigate content, they act as signposts, helping users quickly identify relevant sections and understand what information sits underneath them at a glance.

Frequent, meaningful headings also play an extra role in supporting the AI-generated summaries we know are becoming increasingly common. This is because headings help AI understand the structure of a page by breaking content into logical, retrievable chunks.

Headings also create a hierarchy that shows the relationship between different pieces of information on a page. Therefore, you should always mark up headings with the correct heading level, rather than using bold, underline or larger font sizes. AI also uses the heading hierarchy to:

• understand, summarise and cite your information
• work out which topics are primary, which are subordinate, and how information is grouped together

You can read more about using headings effectively in the style guide, our previous blog post and also on Caroline Jarrett’s ‘Editing that works’ website.

• Headings and page titles (Editorial style guide)​​
• ​Blog post on ‘Editing that works’ (which covers headings)
• ​Editing that works: Headings guidance (Caroline Jarrett)

Accessible content and AI overlap

Content that has been made accessible is a big step towards being AI-ready as screen readers and AI systems rely on many of the same signals, although the outputs are different. Therefore many of the things you hopefully already do to make content accessible will also help AI understand it. We can demonstrate the overlap by looking at headings, link text and alternative text.

Headings: screen reader users use headings to navigate the page structure, whilst AI tools will use them to understand and prioritise your content.

Link text: descriptive link text provides context and helps screen reader users decide where to go next, whilst AI tools will use this link text to help interpret page meaning and relationships between content.

Alternative text: well written alternative text helps users who cannot see images extract meaning from them, whilst it also provides text that AI can use to understand image content.

You can read more about how to make your content accessible in Mel’s blog posts from previous Content Improvement Club sessions:

• Using links and headings to make your content more accessible​
• How to write good alt text​
• ​Revisiting alt text for January’s Content Improvement Club 

Descriptive link text supports users and AI

Descriptive link text is important for users as it helps them understand where the link will take them at a key decision point. This is increasingly important for AI too as AI search and retrieval tools use links and their surrounding context as signals to understand the relationship between different pieces of content.

Therefore, a link labelled ‘Accommodation options for postgraduate students’ provides a much stronger signal than ‘Learn more’ as it helps AI understand both the destination content and how it relates to the current page.

Descriptive link text also helps AI-generated summaries and citations. When AI retrieves content to answer a question, it attributes the source(s). Clear link text can reinforce what a linked page is about and strengthen the connections between related topics.

You can read more about writing effective link text in the style guide and Caroline Jarrett’s ‘Editing that works’ website:

• Links (Editorial style guide)​
• ​Editing that works: Links guidance (Caroline Jarrett)

Write for humans, using plain language

In the age of AI, it’s still important that we write for humans first and foremost. This means using language that your users understand within your content and explaining terms they might not know. Short paragraphs and sentences will also help.

Google’s advice for content to be successful with Google Search is to focus on creating ‘people-first content’, rather than content made ‘primarily to gain search engine rankings’.

Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content | Google Search Central 

You may find Nick’s blog post from a previous Content Improvement Club useful on this topic:

Now you’re speaking my language – what we covered in the February Content Improvement Club session

We worked in small groups to put the theory into practice

After our whistlestop tour of advice to help make content AI-ready, we then worked in small groups, using pages that attendees had brought along to the session. We each picked one or two areas to focus on and shared suggestions to improve the content and talked about what was perhaps already working well. This created some interesting discussion and allowed attendees to gain feedback and new perspectives on their content from colleagues they may not usually work alongside.

Frequently Asked Questions – the debate continues

The debate around the effectiveness of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) is one which has been circulating for some time within the content design world. It has reared it’s head again in relation to AI, given the rise of the ‘answer economy’ where people are typically asking more focused questions and looking for a quick answer.

The main point of contention is whether or not we should be writing more content in a question and answer format. There are different views on this topic, we’ve seen advice to use questions in your content that aim to match the questions that users are asking AI tools.

On some interpretations of this advice, you could read this as a call for more FAQs on websites. We’d like to urge caution before you take this approach though as FAQs aren’t without their problems.

FAQs can often:

• duplicate content that you have elsewhere on the site – this causes problems for site maintenance and search engines don’t tend to like it
• answer questions that aren’t really frequently asked
• make content hard to scan because they push keywords away from the left of the screen as they often start with ‘Can, What, How, Where’

So in summary, don’t rush to change all your headings to questions and create more FAQ sections. If you do use questions, answer them without waffle.

The University of Bath have written a helpful article about this topic.

Why AI doesn’t need Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) | Digital Content and Development

Content maintenance is more important than ever

The final point we covered was the fact that content maintenance is more important than ever. This is because all published content can be cited by AI to generate an answer regardless of when it was last reviewed or updated. Therefore ensuring that you know what live content you have and whether it’s up to date is key if you want AI to bring back accurate information in response to search queries.

Duplicate content can also confuse AI, so regularly auditing your content to make sure there is effective cross referencing between pages and that the same information doesn’t appear on multiple pages, will again make it easier for AI to interpret and find what it needs.

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

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

A year on from the relaunch of our Effective Digital Content online course, we’ve recently made some improvements, particularly in relation to the ‘Understand what your content is for’ module. We’ve rewritten the module, moving from a video to a text-based format.

In this blog I’ll share a bit about the updates we’ve made and the thinking behind them.

Over the last year we identified ways to improve the module

It was always our intention that the course would follow a cycle of continuous improvement, where it would evolve when we identified ways to make it better for learners.

Over the past year, we’ve learnt quite a lot about what makes a module effective through our work to adapt the course for external audiences. Although this project has paused for now, the work has allowed us to improve the course for University colleagues.

We’ve also continued to learn about people’s preferences in how they like to consume information, as well as the environmental impact of the content we create and maintain.

Developing a proof-of-concept course for external audiences gave us a fresh perspective

When exploring how we could evolve the course for external audiences earlier this year, we had to think about new ways to teach certain concepts. The video in the first module explaining the importance of understanding the audience and purpose of your content was one of the areas we knew would need most work. The video had been produced many years ago, specifically for University staff and therefore contained various terms and references that wouldn’t be appropriate for an external course.

We knew how important it was to get this module right as the principles it teaches underpin the rest of the course topics. It involved going back to the drawing board to consider the key learning outcomes of the module and the practical skills we wanted to teach. This process provided the opportunity to re-imagine what the module could become and importantly whether we needed video to convey key messages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ongoing user research showed video was not always the preferred format

We were also aware from speaking to colleagues who had taken the course and in usability testing of the new module, that video was not always their preferred method of obtaining information. Some colleagues mentioned that their preference would be to view or download the transcript instead of watching the video in full, even if the video was relatively short. The benefits of this approach were that they could digest the information at their own pace and be able to refer back to relevant points more efficiently, rather than having to locate the correct place in the video.

These insights, alongside the time intensive process involved in producing and maintaining a new video influenced our decision to reconsider whether a text-based format would work better.

The environmental cost of media use cannot be underestimated

We’ve also been learning through ongoing research into digital sustainability about the environmental cost of media use, particularly images and videos. We’ve learnt the importance of considering the value that the media brings before choosing it as a medium to communicate your message. You can read more about this work in my previous blog.

Videos and images – when do they add value and not just page weight?

As a result, we’ve been questioning whether the video we previously used in the course enhances clarity, context or understanding, or whether we could convey the same information without it.

The module has evolved but the underlying principles remain

We came to the conclusion, based on user feedback and our own inclinations about how to improve the module, that we would remove the current video in the internal course and replace it with a freshly written text format module.

The underlying principles of the module stand true – that the starting point is always to think about the audience and purpose of your content. As a result, the accompanying workbook activities for the module remain unchanged.

There are a few new additions to the module

We’ve added in a new section to explain the key concepts of user needs and business needs, which should help to provide a good foundation for later modules. There are also some more practical University related examples of key concepts.

The previous iteration of the module didn’t have any interactive elements. We’ve received positive feedback on the quiz questions we’ve included in other modules of the course so we decided to include two multiple choice quiz questions so you can check your understanding as you go.

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

I was pleased to have a talk accepted at the annual UCISA Women in Tech (WiT) conference. I went to Newcastle for a day of talks, workshops and networking. I left with a better understanding of the WiT community , and a reinforced appreciation of the need for inclusivity in Higher Education.    

UCISA is an industry body supporting digital professionals working in the education sector. I have been actively involved in UCISA since 2022 when I helped set up the UCISA UX Group and became co-chair of this UK-wide community of practice. I’ve organised many UCISA UX events but had not attended one of UCISA’s flagship annual conferences, the Women in Tech event, until this year. My presentation about our project on staff profiles resonated with attendees, I learned a lot about diversity and representation in the sector from attending the other talks and I enjoyed connecting with other Higher Education professionals over shared inclusivity challenges. Here, I reflect on my highlights from an interesting day.

Sharing our staff profiles work piqued interest from other universities

As well as the clear focus on inclusivity, one of the themes of this year’s WiT was real-world applications and problem-solving. I felt our staff profiles project spoke to this theme, so I submitted a talk to share what we learned from research and the steps we have taken towards finding a new profiles solution.

My session was well received – perhaps unsurprisingly, colleagues from other institutions shared the same concerns and challenges in designing a profile solution that showcases staff in the best light, keeps them findable in searches, and yet remains easy for staff to update. I valued the chance to make new contacts, exchange ideas, and learn about other institutions’ diverse approaches to the ‘profiles problem’. I resolved to stay in touch as we take steps towards implementing a profiles solution at the University, recognising just how universal this need is across the Higher Education sector, and seeing an opportunity for meaningful collaboration.

Read more about the staff profiles project in the blog post series:

Collected blog posts about staff profiles project

Results of a 2025 WiT survey revealed risks and opportunities

One of the core activities of the UCISA WiT committee is to regularly collect data to understand diversity within IT departments across the FE/HE sector. At the conference, WiT committee co-chairs Christi Hopkinson and Katie Wilde shared a preview of the results of the 2025 survey, completed by more than 200 respondents from 66 institutions, with 74.5% of the respondents identifying as female. Several findings stood out from the preliminary report in terms of risks and opportunities.

There’s a risk of retention due to barriers to progression

Responses to a question about progression routes revealed significant proportions of respondents had started in IT in the following areas:

• First/Second Line Support
• Application Support
• Business Analysis
• Project Management
• Web Development

Responses to a follow-up question about the roles respondents were currently working in showed continued representation in these areas, which indicated a degree of stasis when it came to progression in the sector. Areas where women were underrepresented included:

• Infrastructure
• Security
• Enterprise Architecture
• Senior Management.

The survey results showed a third of respondents had considered leaving their institutions or the sector, citing pay, workload and progression as popular reasons motivating them to think about moving on. Common blockers to progression included:

• Lack of available higher-grade roles
• Promotion structures tied only to management, not technical excellence
• Career pathways not transparent
• Women having to ‘prove more’ to progress

There’s potential to be gained by investing in non-technical skills

Most respondents cited the following skills as important for the roles they were currently in as well as for progression:

• Problem solving
• Communication
• Analytical skills
• Customer service
• Business analysis
• Strategic thinking

This spread of skills reinforced the value of focusing training and development on non-technical abilities to complement technical skills, and to ensure expertise was appropriately directed to deliver on broader institutional goals.

There’s room to improve on diversity, inclusion and discrimination

Responses to questions about inclusion and belonging revealed positives and negatives about the workplace respondents were part of.

On the positive side:

• 79% felt valued as part of a team
• 67% felt they were treated fairly and equitably

On the less-positive side:

• Only 34% felt the leadership reflected diversity in the workforce
• 41% felt there were opportunities for careers advancement
• 46% felt their organisation supported under-represented groups
• 47% were satisfied with their organisation’s diversity initiatives

The spread of these numbers provided a clear steer of areas to focus on to achieve less exclusive, and better-balanced IT workplace.

Achieving inclusivity starts with individuals and requires thinking beyond statistics

The survey data gave a snapshot of the current state of inclusivity in the sector, however, anecdotes from individual presenters painted a more vivid picture of what inclusivity could look like. The WiT programme included several women sharing stories of their induction into tech and reflecting on their individual progression routes. It was refreshing to see the diversity of pathways they had taken and interesting to hear about what they had learned along the way, and their tips for success.

Monica Jones, Chief Data Officer at the University of Leeds acknowledged that career progression paths rarely run smoothly, and advised setting personal goals and milestones to work towards, to be best-prepared for promotion opportunities when these came up. Julia Lloyd, College Manager – Business and Law, at the University of the West of England, emphasised the benefits of ‘quiet leadership’ and shared tips to create space for different voices – such as thoughtful structuring of meetings, design of communication channels and rewarding contributions over confidence. A joint talk ‘The Not-So IT Crowd’ from Catriona Blair, Joanna Addison and Sasha Titus from the University of Kent, and a session by Amber Mothersille from the University of Northampton emphasised the value of non-technical skills in technical roles – recognising the need for empathy, trust-building and adaptability to strengthen teams and build excellent digital services.

Breaking barriers requires breaking old biases and habits

A final takeaway from attending the WiT event was a call-to-action to question the way we work – specifically to foster inclusivity by making room for new ways of thinking and for fresh perspectives.

In an interactive exercise led by Katie Wilde, we considered five roles necessary for the operation of successful teams (the Navigator, the Connector, the Builder, the Challenger). In a period of honest reflection, we shared the roles we naturally adopted in team settings, and the roles we tended to overlook or disregard. Going through this exercise was a good leveller as well as a reminder to make room for diversity in everyday team settings instead of relying on familiarity.

The day closed with a thought-provoking talk on male fragility, delivered by Jake Dovey, a UCISA mentor. Drawing on personal anecdotes experienced through his involvement with UCISA, Jake’s talk described instances where men had overreacted defensively to being challenged and where women had inadvertently softened situations to avoid potential conflict and ‘keep the peace’. Jake challenged the women in the room to recognise these instances going forward, and prompted a call-to-action for all to recognise these harmful patterns and call them out to collectively help break the disruptive cycle.

Final thoughts – WiT26 was less about women and more about inclusivity

WiT26 delivered a packed programme which encouraged me to think outside my work in UX and more broadly about the joint responsibilities we all have in creating and fostering an inclusive work environment. I came away with recommendations of books to read and concepts to learn more about, and a heightened awareness of embedding inclusive practices in my day-to-day work and activities. I am keen to see the full results of the WiT 2025 survey and to remain part of the WiT community going forward.

 

Working in information technology, I have been aware of ITIL for a while but had never formally studied it. I attended a three-day training course and passed the ITIL Foundation exam. Here, I share my reflections and my review of ITIL.

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) originated in the 1980s, developed by an agency of the UK government as a way to standardise IT service management practices. It’s now owned by AXELOS and used globally across a range of industries, including Higher Education. The University of Edinburgh uses ITIL to structure aspects of organisational governance as well as many of its processes. I was curious to learn about ITIL as I felt it would help me make sense of the way some things work within ISG.

Read more about ITIL:

ITIL website

I studied the ITIL 4 Foundation course, which covers concepts like the Service Value System, value co-creation between provider and consumer, the four dimensions of service management, guiding principles, and key ITIL practices like the service desk, service request management, incident management and change management. Going through the course and completing the exam, I came away with several reflections about ITIL and its application to modern digital services.

First rule of ITIL: It’s not supposed to just be about IT (but it mainly is)

For a discipline with IT in its title, it was surprising to learn that ITIL is actually intended as a more generic service management framework, supposed to be applicable to non-technical as well as technical services. ITIL’s IT roots were clear, however, as many of the examples intended to ground the abstract concepts related to management of very traditional technical services, and it was hard to visualise practices like deployment management applied to non-technical realms. Conversely, it was difficult to visualise ITIL flexing to be applicable to the management of emergent technical services, such as machine or AI-based services with rapidly evolving operating models.

Service dominant logic, continuous improvement and systems thinking were familiar

Many of the ITIL artefacts are expressions of service value, based on a fundamental concept that value from a service can only come if it is co-created. In other words, if a service is not used, it cannot create value (no matter how good it is). I’d previously learned about Service Dominant Logic, (described in 2004 as a marketing concept by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch), so it was interesting to make the connection between these two disciplines. Whereas Vargo, Lusch and others focus on value dimensions, and the interplay between operand and operant resources, however, ITIL delineated service value through models like the Service Value System and the Service Value Chain.

Continuous improvement was another key ITIL focus, but guided by artefacts like Service Level Agreements and practices like Service Request Management, and motivated by efficiency and compliance focused targets rather than user-focused improvement drivers like UX or CX.

Systems thinking was another thread running through ITIL, however, it seemed limited in its use to describe sequences of inputs and output from different activities in value streams – without inclusion of Soft Systems Methodology (described by Peter Checkland in 1989), universally useful as a way to diagnose problems.

ITIL’s terminology tended to overwhelm the logic and the purpose

Naming things is hard and changing the names of things can lead to even more confusion. When it came to the words used in ITIL, it seemed that those who developed ITIL had thought long and hard about what to call the models, processes, practices and so on. For the uninitiated coming to ITIL fresh, however, it was natural to question why things were named in certain ways and to forget and mix up the terms, as well as question the absence of certain concepts. There seemed little scope to mould the rigid ITIL glossary to real-life scenarios, instead it seemed at risk of institutions trying to fit ITIL rather than the other way around.

Considering this conundrum, I was reminded of work I began a while ago to reduce jargon in Drupal, and of my ongoing work to shape the Web Sustainability Guidelines to be universally applicable. In both instances I had learned of the difficulty in choosing the right words and phrases to meaningfully describe abstract concepts, and therefore could appreciate the length of time it could take small changes to take effect in such a well-established standardisation mechanism as ITIL.

Read about my work on Drupalisms in this blog post:

De-jargoning Drupal – working with the community to open up Drupal’s terminology

Read about my work on the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines in this blog post:

Shaping the future of the sustainable web: The advent and development of the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines

 

Drupal In A Day (DIAD) is an in-person training event, designed as a beginner-friendly hands-on introduction to Drupal, the open-source content management system. When the University hosted DIAD, several of the UX team took the chance to attend.

As content management systems go, Drupal is one of the mainstays. It’s been around for 25 years and is particularly famed for its robustness, reliability and flexibility – so much so it’s trusted to power websites of enterprises, governments and higher education institutions around the world. It’s open-source so there’s no proprietary lock-in – the functionality, features and innovation available in Drupal comes from a thriving worldwide community of contributors – as individuals, agencies and organisations.

One of the best places to learn about what Drupal is, what it stands for and what it aims to achieve is the blog site of its founder, Dries Buytaert.

Dries Buytaert blog

In 2025, Hilmar Kári Hallbjörnsson taught the first Drupal In A Day on the final day of DrupalCon Vienna.  Hilmar had been teaching Drupal to students at the universities of Reykavik and Iceland for many years and felt strongly that teaching Drupal to new generations, to inform them of its capabilities, and to inspire them of its potential was something the Drupal community needed, as a way to nurture the longevity and sustain the future of Drupal. Through a tremendous effort, he made the first Drupal In A Day happen in Vienna in October 2025. It was very well-received, successfully establishing the Drupal In A Day format going forward.

Read more about the first Drupal In A Day in Hilmar’s blog post from 2025

Drupal in a Day: Vienna 

Hilmar travelled to Edinburgh to deliver Drupal In A Day with our own Web Development Team Manager, Gareth Alexander at the start of June 2026.  Nick (Senior Content Designer), Shlok (AI and UX Innovation Intern) and Hannah (Digital Content Style Guide Intern) from the UX team signed up for the event along with other LTW interns and staff from the wider University with an interest in learning about Drupal. Here, they reflect on their experiences of the day.

Nick’s reflections 

I attended this training to bring my understanding of Drupal up to date. The last time I set up a Drupal site was in the early 2010s, and a lot has changed since then. With Drupal providing the backbone to EdWeb 2, I wanted to get to grips with some of the terminology and concepts that underpin conversations within our team about what our central CMS can do. 

I was particularly interested to learn more about Drupal CMS, a new service that helps you set up a Drupal site more quickly and with less need for technical understanding. 

After getting the required software set up on my laptop (thanks Kirsten), I clicked along with Hilmar and Gareth as they walked us through the various sections of Drupal CMS. We worked through steps to create a new content type and we created different Views to display the same content. We tweaked image formats. We also learned how to attach tags to a piece of content and how these tags can act as a filter for overview pages. 

By the end of the day, I hadn’t suddenly become a Drupal expert. But I did have a better understanding of how EdWeb 2 works behind the scenes. In particular, I felt like I knew more about how EdWeb 2 takes the content you enter when you create a page and presents this in different ways elsewhere on a site. 

Alongside that, I would now feel more confident in setting up a new Drupal CMS site, and I now have a better understanding of what this system offers in comparison to other ways of operating a website. 

Finally, the day gave me a better sense of how the community aspect of Drupal is central to how this project keeps going. Hilmar and Gareth emphasised that there are various events in the calendar where people working with Drupal can meet up and collaborate. That’s a powerful message: that anyone is invited to learn more, become part of the community and contribute to how this system works. 

Shlok’s reflections

Before starting my internship, Drupal was a completely new concept to me. I did not really know what a content management system was, how Drupal worked, or why it was used by universities and other large organisations. Because of that, Drupal In A Day was a really useful introduction for me. 

I thought the format worked well because going through everything in one day helped keep a flow of information. It was quite intense and sometimes fast-paced, but that also meant we were able to cover a lot of concepts in a short amount of time. I would say I was able to follow around 70% of the session, which felt like a good start considering Drupal was completely new to me. 

One of the parts I found most useful was the introduction to Drupal itself. It helped me understand what Drupal is, what a CMS is, and why the University uses it. I learnt that Drupal is valued because it is stable, secure, flexible and open source, which makes it suitable for large and complex websites like those used by universities. This helped me understand why Drupal is still used by many major institutions. 

I also found it interesting to learn about the Drupal community and the different ways people can work with Drupal. Before the session, I assumed Drupal was mainly for developers. However, I learnt that people can build careers around Drupal in different ways. Some roles involve coding and development, while others focus more on design, content, user experience, training or project work. That helped me see Drupal as more than just a technical platform. 

One point that really stood out to me was when we were told that Drupal has a steep learning curve at the start. This was useful to hear because it made the difficulties I was facing feel expected. Since many people find Drupal challenging in the beginning, it was reassuring to know that not understanding everything straight away was normal. It made me feel more comfortable continuing to learn. 

During the practical parts of the day, I learnt about some of the basic Drupal features, such as creating and managing content pages. At first, this was quite confusing because the concepts were new to me. However, as the day went on, I started to become more comfortable with the terminology and the way Drupal is structured. 

Another part that I found very helpful was the follow-up assignment where we had to build something from scratch. After learning so much in one day, I think it was important to have a task that allowed us to apply what we had learnt. It helped me consolidate my knowledge, see which parts I had not fully understood during the session, and become more comfortable with Drupal before starting work on my internship prototypes. 

One thing I would have liked to learn more about was the command line and the use of terminal commands. We touched on some setup and development processes, but I think spending more time on what the commands do and how they fit into the Drupal workflow would have helped me. I would also have liked to learn more about the coding side of Drupal, especially how to build custom Drupal modules. This is particularly relevant to my internship because my work is focused on AI and innovation within Drupal. 

If I could suggest one change, it would be to make Drupal In A Day into a two-day or three-day format. The first day could stay mostly the same, giving everyone a broad introduction to Drupal. The second day could be a slower guided session where participants build something with support from the instructors, similar to the assignment we were given afterwards. A third optional day could focus more on coding and custom module development for those who want to explore the technical side further. 

Hannah’s reflections 

I signed up for the Drupal in a Day training with very little knowledge of the CMS beyond working with existing EdWeb 2 sites, such as when creating prototypes of Style Guide pages or writing blog posts. So, I was interested in increasing my knowledge of Drupal as well as gaining the ability to build a site. Before the training began, I was unsure how well I would follow the instructions as a beginner, but Hilmar, Gareth, and all of the members of the Drupal community who were present at the training were extremely helpful, informative, and patient when it came to giving assistance at points where I was confused or behind. 

Once I had overcome a technical error with my laptop and decided to use Drupal Forge, I was able to follow along with the instructions being provided and replicate the Artist biography pages that Hilmar and Gareth were demonstrating. The course was fast-paced and detailed, and while maintaining this pace was a challenge, it made the course engaging and the product of the day felt like a genuine accomplishment. 

With the knowledge that I gained throughout the training, I feel that I have a strong foundation that will allow me to continue to develop my skills in building a Drupal site further in the future. In particular, I think the example site that we were creating during the training was incredibly useful in that it allowed us to try out several different aspects of building a site with Drupal, such as different content types, tags, and images, as well as exploring some different design options as well. 

I was impressed to learn about how community centred Drupal is, and that contributions and developments to Drupal are made by users and members of the community. Gareth and Hilmar’s explanations of how this works really helped me to understand why Drupal is as adaptive and intuitive as it is (such as in its security and bug fixes), which is that these developments are a direct result of user experience. Furthermore, Gareth and Hilmar also emphasised the flexibility of Drupal, due to the ability to install ‘recipes’ that customise the functionality of sites that you are building. 

Overall, I think Drupal in a Day was an extremely useful and practical training session that has equipped me with the skills to build a basic site and further develop these skills whenever I have the chance.  

Emma’s reflections

When it comes to Drupal, I am largely self-taught – pretty much everything I know has been gleaned from reading, attending/watching sessions from Drupal events, and (predominately) pestering people in-the-know with my questions. When Drupal In A Day came to the University, I pondered whether I should attend. I’ve contributed to the community since 2022. I’m on the Drupal leadership team. Surely I should know Drupal by now? I took a split second to reflect and realise that you never fully know Drupal. There’s always something new to learn, something to challenge what you thought you understood, or something to clarify an area you weren’t quite sure about. Conscious of not taking a space away from a complete Drupal beginner, I opted to sit in on the event, to follow along, while working on other things.

The day combined practical exercises with general Drupal knowledge. Hilmar and Gareth began with the basics, covering key parts of the process to get started and familiarise with Drupal – like setting up DDEV, using Drupalforge and creating a Drupal.org profile. As the day went on, it was great to see quick progression to experiment with some of Drupal’s flagship modules, especially Drupal Views which holds huge power for presenting and displaying structured content in a range of adaptive ways.

Drupal CMS, Drupal’s low-code product provided the playground for learners. Having worked on Drupal CMS since it began, I found it heartening to see it being used to introduce Drupal to new audiences, to help them learn what Drupal has to offer and to help them start ideating on how they might use it. Adopting a UX perspective, I tuned into comments from fellow attendees about Drupal CMS, noting observations to follow up and logging areas for UX improvement to carry forward in my ongoing Drupal UX contributions.

Reflecting on the day as a whole, it helped attendees achieve what is often the hardest thing about Drupal: Getting started. All too often people new to Drupal can find it overwhelming, and they find when everything is possible it’s hard to choose a direction. Drupal In A Day sets learners on a path to start discovering Drupal and making it their own, in other words, planting a seed from which the community can continue to grow.

In May, Mel and Nick from the UX team attended two days of Power BI training with QA. The training covered the basics of using Power BI Desktop and, through a mix of instructor-led and independent exercises, gave us a chance to transform data and build visualisations.

Mel’s reflections

Before the training, I’d only ever experienced Power BI from the other side, seeing polished dashboards and interactive visuals without really understanding how they were built. By the end of the training, I felt much more confident using Power BI and excited to start applying it in my work.

Learning through doing

The sessions suited the way I learn best: having a go, clicking around, experimenting and working through exercises rather than just watching demonstrations. Having the training in person made a big difference, as we could troubleshoot problems together and ask questions whenever we got stuck.

I also appreciated the pace and structure of the training. Our instructor, Jason, talked through each step clearly and acted as a guide throughout, explaining not just what to do, but why we were doing it. His knowledge of the system really came across and the sessions felt approachable rather than overwhelming.

Movie datasets solidified my understanding

The most enjoyable part of the training for me was working with the movie dataset. We pulled together information from sites like Box Office Mojo and Rotten Tomatoes to consider how data from multiple sources can be combined to tell a richer story. In doing so, the relationships between datasets, transformations and visualisations became much clearer.

This was  the point where I had the “eureka” moment of understanding how all the different pieces of the puzzle connect together within Power BI.

Keen to keep the Power BI momentum going

Since the training, I’ve been keen to build on what I learned by applying Power BI to real project work. I recently used it to explore qualitative survey data relating to digital design tools, using techniques from the training to clean and organise the data. The training materials proved especially useful, particularly the exercise workbook, which gave me something practical to refer back to.

Working with a familiar dataset made the process feel much less intimidating. It was rewarding to apply what I’d learned so quickly in a real project context.

Nick’s reflections

I thought this training was excellent. I’d seen Power BI dashboards before but didn’t know what you have to do behind the scenes to create them. I attended this training to learn a bit about how Power BI works and improve my skills around working with data more generally.

How Power BI can support UX work

I was interested to see how Power BI could support our work in the UX Service. We work with data that supports our administration of training sessions and our online course Effective Digital Content. We also sometimes deal with sitemaps and analytics, which can include a daunting amount of information. All of this data needs to be tidied up and visualised so we can quickly understand it and use it. While we can do some of that in Excel, spreadsheets have their limits and I wanted to find out what Power BI has to offer.

What we learned

The training involved clicking through activities with our instructor Jason. I found this was a good way to get to grips with the software, and I gradually built up a rough conceptual model of what was going on within Power BI.

In the session, we learned how to:

• ingest data from sources such as spreadsheets and webpages
• combine data from different sources
• tidy up data
• do operations on data
• visualise data

In person training worked well

Doing the session in person meant we got to catch up with colleagues in our department while completing the training. It also made it easy to get pointers when something didn’t work. We could quickly ask a colleague to help with the minor problems that inevitably crop up when you’re learning to use a new piece of software.

I came out of the training with an appreciation of what Power BI can do, and a better understanding of how it works. I’d recommend this training to any colleagues at the University who are interested in learning more about working with data.

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 

From the birthplace of the original Industrial Revolution, a group of around 2000 intrepid EdTech practitioners and enthusiasts sought to examine and understand what has been dubbed the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution.’ I was fortunate to be among them for Jisc Digifest 2026 in Birmingham this week.

There were many opportunities to contribute and get creative

 

Adobe offered delegates a chance to design their own chocolate bar wrapper using the AI tools embedded in Adobe Express. Origami, jigsaw puzzles, and colouring in were available in the Community Hub area.

We have the power to affect change

The conference kicked off with an inspiring keynote speech by climate activist Melati Wijsen. Since the age of 12, Melati has been a passionate advocate for environmental issues, having addressed audiences at the UN and Davos. Her compelling argument underscored the crucial need to include young people in our decision-making processes.

Daniel Liu from the University of Sydney provided a compelling case in allowing students to direct their own learning with AI tools. His case study showed examples of students generating their own self-directed learning tools using an LLM trained on their course materials. In seconds, they were able to generate pop-quizzes, simulations, and interactive graphics to supplement their learning experience.

Liu and many other speakers emphasised that we would do our students a disservice by denying access to these tools, and that it is the duty of educators to ensure that they are taught to use them effectively.

Access to technology is essential to living in the modern world: We must work to ensure that nobody is left behind

I was particularly interested to hear about the positive steps being made in digital inclusion spaces.

Elizabeth Newall presented a set of guidelines that Jisc has developed to assist transnational education (TNE) students and staff. This session was an excellent reminder of the considerations we must make when building our digital estates: for example, we might not think twice when uploading a large image file on one of our webpages over fibre-optic, but such an image might be a severe pain point for a consumer on a cellular-based internet connection.

Such considerations are of particular interest to me: as the Service Manager for the portal service, MyEd, I need to ensure that our services are as lightweight and responsive as possible in order to remain accessible to all of our users.

In a similar vein, I was interested to learn about the UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Action Plan. For many of us, completing tasks like paying for parking or filling in a tax form is made more convenient when done online. However, this is a source of enormous risk for the 8 million people identified by this plan – especially when the action can only be completed online.

Enthusiasm for AI is high among professionals, but questions remain

It is my perception that AI in education technology is beginning to mature and that there is an increasing sense of surety around its potential. This was perhaps best illustrated by the collaborative art piece that was drawn in real-time over the course of the two days. Seeded with the simple question ‘What kind of future do you want to help create?’, a clear picture began to emerge of the exciting potential that these disruptive technologies could provide.

 

On the other hand, there are still fundamental questions about AI that are still outstanding, such as: ownership and sustainability of the hardware that AI relies on, the reliance many AI models have on consuming the intellectual property of others, and even the potential for AI to erode the very skills and qualities that make us human.

In perhaps my favourite session of all, ‘Inside the student experience: change, challenges and future hopes’, such concerns were echoed by a panel of student digital champions. They emphasised the importance of listening to student voices and involving them in the decision-making process at all levels. Their perspectives reinforced the notion that the technology of tomorrow must be developed not just with intelligence, but with wisdom and a deep respect for what it means to be human.

Following a successful launch of Effective Digital Content, our internal course that staff complete to learn and practice fundamental content design skills, the UX Service saw an opportunity to make the course more widely available, on the University’s Short Courses platform.

In May 2025, after months of user research-informed development work, my UX Service team delivered a new Effective Digital Content course to University staff. To date, hundreds of staff have successfully completed the course with some staff openly celebrating their achievement by sharing their digital badge.

Read more about how the team adopted a staff-centred approach to developing the Effective Digital Content course:

Series of blog posts about the Effective Digital Content course

Demand for the course from other universities prompted us to think bigger

After the launch of the Effective Digital Content (EDC) course, the UX team presented their work to various forums and groups. 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. There were various options to make the course public, and following conversations with University colleagues in Open Education and the Short Courses platform, we decided to pursue adding Effective Digital Content to the short online courses portfolio, to make it part of the University’s continuing professional development offering.

University of Edinburgh short courses website

Market research confirmed EDC a good fit for the short online courses portfolio

As the team behind the course, we acknowledged our bias in deeming it suitable for inclusion in the Short Courses platform. In order to make a more objective assessment of its suitability, we needed to do some research into the external target market and also, to identify related courses and programmes. Google Trends data revealed a growth for the content design sector in recent years, and further market analysis showed that although competitor content design courses were available, none were offered by universities or were targeted specifically at the Higher Education sector, suggesting our EDC could fill a market niche.

Content professionals from the public sector were defined as a target audience

Taking into account competitor courses and their respective offerings and critiquing the content in each of the EDC modules we defined the kind of person we felt would be interested in and would benefit from taking the EDC course. These included:

• Staff working in communications, marketing, academic or administrative roles in the public sector, working with text-heavy content to ensure compliance with standards
• People with responsibility for creating or managing digital content on websites, social media or other platforms
• Those new to content design with broader writing or content creation experience
• Professionals interested in growing skills and confidence working with content as part of continuing professional development.

Our proposal to reposition EDC as a short online course was approved

Supplying the market research findings together with an appraisal of the course against University-wide criteria such as alignment with strategic objectives and sustainability goals meant the proposal for EDC to be included in the Short Courses portfolio was approved by senior management, giving us the green light to proceed with making it happen.

Design and technical constraints prevented us lifting and shifting the existing course

Excited by the prospect of seeing EDC in a new platform, the UX team dived in, familiarising with Canvas and Eduframe – the dual technologies underpinning the Short Courses platform. After some initial experimentation, however, it quickly became clear that a straight migration of the course content wouldn’t work for several reasons:

• The section headings of the existing EDC course didn’t map directly into the structure of Canvas
• Some of the existing EDC video module content was directly Edinburgh-centric (referring to systems like EdWeb for example)
• The workbook element of the course (where learners receive feedback on worked example) wasn’t feasible to scale beyond an internal audience

Considering these problems one-by-one made them difficult to solve, as there were dependencies between them, as well as additional unknowns still to be worked out.

Read more about Learning Management System software Canvas and Eduframe on the Instructure website

I brought in a product development framework to keep things on track

Having worked as a UX Lead on various projects, I recognised that when decisions become difficult, it is worth taking a step back to consider the bigger picture, to avoid getting lost in the details and potentially making decisions based on short-term logic that may have adverse consequences in the longer-term. Drawing on my most recent experience, working as part of the Drupal CMS product team, I referred to a useful product design framework, the Product Kata, from ‘The Build Trap’ book by Melissa Perri.

 

This framework follows a classic UX design process whereby the product strategy and vision provide the direction, and an analysis of the current state indicates the work to be done to achieve the vision. With the gulf between the current state and the vision defined, it is possible to set milestone goals and establish the relevant product process step to achieve these: problem exploration, solution exploration or solution optimisation.

I used details from our approved proposal document to define a product vision

Using examples from ‘The Build Trap’ as inspiration, and drawing on the information supplied in the proposal, I pulled together a product vision for EDC as a short online course, outlined as follows:

Product vision

To become the first-choice digital content training course for professionals in Higher Education – equipping them with the practical knowledge and confidence they need to create content that is clear, accessible, transparent and sustainable.

The problem our product is solving

As public sector institutions, universities have strict accessibility, legal and transparency obligations. Thousands of people working for universities are responsible for creating and maintaining digital content – but many have not received support or dedicated training. The result is content that’s difficult to read, costly to maintain and runs the risk of being inaccessible to many users.

The gap our product is addressing

There are lots of content design courses available, but few address the practical realities of writing digital content in the Higher Education sector, where accessibility compliance, inclusivity and  transparency are non-negotiable.

Who our product is serving

The main audience for our product are staff in professional roles who publish digital content a part of their broader roles and need practical guidance they can absorb at their own pace and can immediately apply to their own contexts. A secondary audience  is those wishing to move into content design roles, perhaps from related fields such as copywriting or social media communications.

What makes our product stand out from the competition

Our course was built by content professionals working inside a prestigious Russell Group university, responding to real needs identified by years of research with staff with content publishing responsibilities. It has been refined over years and has been completed by over one thousand staff. Unlike competitor course which are marketing led or are UX-oriented, our course specifically addresses:

• Hands-on guidance on making content accessible
• Ways to improve the efficiency of finding information, reducing cognitive load and friction
• Responsible practices to reduce unnecessary digital waste and promote sustainability
• Real-world context – with examples and exercises grounded in the Higher Education environment
• Practical application of theory, designed to be adaptable and applicable in learners’ own contexts.

The strategic value associated with our product

Our course stands to bring value to the University of Edinburgh by:

• Extending the reach and impact of our in-house content design expertise to a wider audience
• Positioning the University as a leader in digital content practice
• Demonstrating commitment to knowledge-sharing and sector collaboration

It also promises to deliver value to learners and their respective organisations by:

• Building a common language and baseline standard for content design across the sector
• Addressing growing regulatory and accessibility obligations
• Supporting staff professional development
• Helping to reduce costly content errors and accessibility failures.

At a more granular level, I teased out learning outcomes for each course module

Regarding the collection of modules in the internal version of the EDC to represent the ‘current state’, I wrote learning outcomes for each module, to epitomise the purpose of each one.

To form the learning outcomes, I  firstly thought about the practical skills learners would gain on completion, but that felt limited. Perhaps more important for the learners to take away was an appreciation of what these skills could achieve with them and therefore why they were important. Added to this, I felt that each module should also leave learners with an impetus to take the skills and apply them to content in own contexts.

Recalling how we developed EDC for internal staff, I remembered how we worked hard to avoid a static learning experience – and instead provide an experience where the learner is actively guided to apply what they have learned, both to supplied examples in the course but also to their own real-life circumstances.

In the book ‘Learning Experience Design: How to Create Effective Learning that Works’, author Donald Clark refers to this set of emotions as ‘Reflective feeling’:

One important facet of reflective feeling comes through the follow-up, actually doing something. This can be triggered by nudge learning so that the learner gets their kicks through going back to their job and actually implementing a challenge” – Donald Clark, Learning Experience Design: How to Create Effective Learning that Works, 2022

With this in mind I grouped the learning outcomes under ‘practical skills’, ‘knowledge and understanding’ and ‘attitude and awareness’. Examples of each for the module ‘Get link text right’ were as follows:

Practical skill

• Write link text that is clear, meaningful and make sense on its own out of context

Knowledge and understanding

• Understand why certain phrases like ‘click here’, ‘more’ and ‘further information’ should never be used as link text

Attitude and awareness

• Appreciate that good link text improves the experience for all users, not just those with accessibility needs.

The learning outcomes serve as principles to guide content trade-offs and define a proof-of-concept

Having learning outcomes for each module has helped us critique the existing EDC content, to establish what is needed to meet the learning outcomes, what is a nice-to-have and what might be missing. This is, in turn helping to set a blueprint for the minimal content of each module for EDC within the short courses platform.

Referring back to the Product Kata, these outcomes serve as a way to progress from the stage 2 current state to stage 3 where we set our next goals. In real terms this means that as we continue to make decisions about course content – for example, whether to include videos, or how to provide learner feedback, how to replace the workbook element of the course, we can use the outcomes as guardrails to refer to, to drive our decision-making in an auditable way. Collectively these decisions or milestone goals will inform a proof-of-concept ready for testing with representative audiences – the results of which will guide stage 4 and our path of execution – problem exploration, solution exploration or solution optimisation as appropriate.

We’re working with colleagues to deliver the proof-of-concept by summer 2026

Repositioning our EDC course for a new platform has been a learning curve so far, and we’re continuing to draw on the expertise of University colleagues in the teaching and learning realm to ensure we make best use of the technology to deliver a course which meets the need of our target audiences and is an attractive proposition for them to engage with to learn content design.

We’ve set a target to achieve a proof-of-concept course by summer 2026, and are working towards this through a series of three-week long sprints, each focused on one of the course modules – including review of content against learning outcomes, ideation around activities and exercises and testing with at least one user. When we reach the end of these planned sprints, we have a view to testing the entire course with participants representative of the target audience, to iterate on research learnings and deliver a version one of our EDC product by the start of the next academic year 2026/2027.

Exciting times ahead! We’re grateful to the support of the Short Courses team, the Learning Technology team and others to help us bring our content design expertise to life in a new EDC short online course.

A couple of weeks ago, I packed my notebook and headed to London for two back-to-back events organised by Boye & Co: The UK Digital Leaders meeting and CMS Experts. After two days and a lot of discussions with the support of quality coffee, and delicious Thai and Indian food, I took the train back to Edinburgh having enough ideas, links and reflections to fill several blog posts. Here’s my summary.

About these events

Boye & Co run a series of peer group meetings over each year for digital professionals, bringing together practitioners from a range of sectors in small, high-trust settings. That format works well, encouraging genuine and honest conversation, and it’s very common to hear the real stories behind the polished case studies. This was not my first UK Digital Leaders, or CMS Experts, event, since myself and colleagues have been attending similar events over the last few years, so knew what to expect and was excited about the upcoming discussions. Both groups had overlap in attendees and themes, which made the two days feel satisfyingly joined up.

Reflections from a conference focussing on digital leadership in higher education – October 2025, by Stratos Filalithis

Key insights from the 2025 UK Digital Leaders Summit day in Cambridge – October 2025, by Emma Horrell

My takeaways from the latest Digital Leaders London meet-up – March 2025, by Emma Horrell

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.

Earlier this year, the UX Service launched a new version of the Effective Digital Content (EDC) online course. This blog outlines why the course matters and how it supports anyone involved in creating or managing digital content across the University. 

In today’s digital world, information is constantly competing for attention. At the University, we publish a large volume of digital content. In such a busy environment, it’s crucial that what we create truly works for our audiences. The EDC course helps us do exactly that.

In a content-heavy world, effective content matters 

People likely arrive at our content already juggling notifications, distractions, and demanding tasks. Their cognitive load may be high, so our content must be as clear as possible. 

It’s important digital content is: 

• easy to use, understand and find 
• user-centred 
• consistent 
• accessible 

Clarity is essential, not optional. Effective content respects people’s time, helps them complete tasks quickly and delivers the right information at the right moment.  

The EDC course helps you create content that is findable, understandable, and genuinely useful.

The course is for anyone who contributes to digital content 

EDC is designed for anyone who creates, updates or contributes to digital content. That includes staff in communications and marketing, but also researchers, academics, professional services staff, service owners, managers and interns.If your work touches web content in any way, the course provides practical, actionable skills you can apply immediately.

What the course involves 

The course includes six modules, as well as a practical workbook with an exercise for each: 

• Understanding what your content is for  
• Creating accessible content  
• Writing effective headings  
• Getting link text right  
• Working with the style guide  
• Maintaining your content 

What you’ll gain from the course

We’ve picked out a few clear benefits of taking the course. 

It’s a chance to refresh your knowledge  

This course is a great opportunity to refresh your knowledge, whether it’s your first time taking it or you’re coming back for a refresher. It’s always useful to revisit and practice the principles that make digital content effective.

We’ve focused on making the guidance clearer, more engaging, and easier to apply. We’ve also updated some of the guidance to reflect best practice and where the core guidance hasn’t changed, we’ve tried to explain it in a way that’s easier to understand and remember, and put into practice.

If you’ve taken the previous version of EDC, the refreshed examples, exercises, and explanations make it worthwhile to revisit, and you may pick up something new along the way.

Tailored and actionable feedback is provided

A key new feature of the course is the personalised feedback you receive on your workbook. This guidance is designed to help you apply what you’ve learned directly to your real-world publishing tasks, making the learning feel personal and relevant.

So far, learners have consistently highlighted this as one of the most helpful parts of the course. They say it boosts their confidence and gives them clear, actionable next steps for improving their content. It’s been rewarding to see people finish the course feeling supported and better equipped in their content work. Even better, it’s been great to see them making meaningful improvements to their pages based on the reflection and practical tasks they complete in the workbook.

Earn a digital badge 

Another benefit of the updated course is the introduction of a digital badge awarded upon completion of the workbook. This BadgEd (Open Digital Badges) accreditation recognises the skills and effort you’ve put into the course. It can also be shared on LinkedIn or professional platforms, or to support your continuing professional development. 

Mainly, the badge helps highlight your commitment to clear, effective communication, something increasingly important across all roles in the University. 

You can find out more about the BadgEd scheme on their web page.

BadgEd (Open Digital Badges)

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 

Insights and reflections on building the course

You can explore our process for creating the new EDC course and read about lessons learned from its launch in our previous blog posts: 

• Our six-part series on building the Effective Digital Content course  
• Six practical tips: what we learnt building a new online course 
• Six months of the Effective Digital Content online course 

 

Earlier this year, our team worked with the Digital Skills team to develop a short webinar aimed at staff who support students. The goal was to help our colleagues understand how students can use MyEd to traverse our complex digital estate more effectively.

Why the webinar was needed

The primary need that this webinar fulfils is that staff generally aren’t able to see what a student sees in MyEd. MyEd personalises its content and layout depending on the user, so a staff member will have a completely different experience to a student. This is one of MyEd’s key features: students only see content which is relevant to students, and the same principle applies to staff and applicants. However, this does pose a challenge for support staff who need to know how a student can navigate MyEd to complete the tasks that matter to them.

This is something that support staff have fed back to us for some time, so it has been good to develop the webinar as a solution.

We developed the webinar with support staff in mind

When developing the webinar, we made sure that the session was as concise as possible. We settled on a run time of 30 minutes (20 minutes of content and 10 minutes of discussion) as we are aware of the many pulls on our support colleagues’ time.

When deciding on the content, we chose to focus on three elements:

• Explain in detail how the content and layout of MyEd differs between different user types
• Provide a walkthrough of the main tasks that students complete through MyEd
• Demonstrate how the Favourites function in MyEd can be used by students to highlight the items that are most important to them

The webinar needed additional support materials

While we thought that the short demonstration of the student view in MyEd was valuable, we expected that viewers were likely to want to take screenshots for their own personal reference. We thought that this would be undesirable, as such screenshots could become obsolete should the layout or content changed in the future.

For this reason, we decided to provide a set of up-to-date screenshots on the MyEd Support Hub and promote this during the webinar. Now support staff can reference this resource and be safe in the knowledge that the information is remains correct. This resource is available to everyone with a University of Edinburgh Office 365 login:

Student view of MyEd in the MyEd Support Hub

We are planning to continue these sessions in the new year

So far, we have delivered 5 sessions to 61 attendees. Feedback has been positive, with many attendees indicating that the new resource in the MyEd Support Hub was the most interesting part of the session.

We plan to continue to deliver these sessions in the new year. If you or someone you know is interested in attending one of these sessions, please feel free to contact me and I’ll make sure that you are informed when the next batch of sessions are scheduled.