Helping students find support online: How usability tests of the student health and wellbeing site led to content improvements

When the team behind the health and wellbeing website contacted the UX Service for help improving their student-facing content ahead of the new academic year, we were happy to oblige. Adopting a coaching approach, we guided them through usability testing to identify and prioritise content changes, to make it easier for students to find out […]

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From sustainable design principles to practical W3C guidelines: Making digital sustainability happen through UX design

Contributing to the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines, I enjoyed working with talented editors and UX professionals to shape 21 guidelines in the User Experience Design category. In this post, I spotlight selected guidelines, reflecting on how they were written, and how they encapsulate the ethos of the principles behind them. The W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines […]

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

For the past year I have been part of a UX task force developing the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines. As the guidelines reach the milestone of Draft Note status, I reflect on what they stand to achieve, and share insights from our process to make these guidelines as useful and usable as possible. Increasingly, websites […]

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How do students respond to AI in an enquiry service? What we learned testing AskEdHelp

Continuing our UX research on AI features, we worked with the EdHelp team to design and run user tests to learn how students respond to their ELM-enhanced online enquiry service, AskEdHelp. This post documents our methods, findings and recommendations.  The inclusion of AI in online experiences is becoming the norm, and at the University, the […]

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Making a website better for users and the environment: Working on digital sustainability with Edinburgh Innovations

Last year, our Green Digital Design Intern audited the Edinburgh Innovations website for digital sustainability, and made several recommendations. This year’s internship went further – researching how users actually interacted with the site and uncovering potential to improve both the site’s UX and its environmental impact. In 2024 the UX Service and the wider Website […]

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Creative thinking, community-building, conversations: My takeaways from DrupalCamp Scotland 2025

With nine talks on topics ranging from Object-Oriented UX to Single Directory Components to image-management, DrupalCamp Scotland 2025 packed a lot into a day. I left with new insights, feedback on my work, and plenty of ideas for my University and Drupal UX leadership roles. Drupal is a highly capable, flexible and secure open-source content […]

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How do students respond to AI-powered search, and how does it compare to Google? More Drupal AI UX experiments

In January, the UX team spent a day ideating on how to apply Drupal AI to University web content management and built a prototype including an AI-powered search feature. But would students find it useful and usable? Preliminary UX research revealed useful insights. Search is an aspect of web content management that is notoriously difficult […]

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