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