Articles
Thoughts and musings about user experience, content, product and service design and strategy.
Develop a strong digital strategy
Do you have a vision and strategy that is fit to propel you into the digital age? Does the term ‘digital’ even make sense?
Cultural change for digital success
Digital transformation is as much about changes to ways of working as it is about changes to technology. If you don’t bring people along for the ride or put them in the front seat, you are doomed to failure.
Are you really involving students in your design process?
Higher Education is all about students. To design an exceptional digital experience you need to understand student needs and expectations. Rather than speculate, bring students into the heart of everything you do. Let them participate and lead your research forward.
How to make the student experience more accessible and inclusive
Acknowledging that your students are not like you is the first step. Devising personas and profiles representing the broad student community will provide you with a solid means to objectively assess your work and empathise with users.
Student self-service, the future of higher education
You can reduce student frustration and time spent answering phone calls by putting as much support online as possible. Invest in mechanisms for students to self-serve answers to their questions, freeing up advisers to spend more time answering the more complex queries.
A successful digital team
I have been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to lead an incredible team of digital experts. Here's what I learned.
How feedback can improve the quality of your digital service
Here are five ways I discovered that analysing feedback helps improve digital services.
Ten opportunities for improving digital student support services
These recommendations are based on my first-hand experience working in digital student support. I worked at The Open University for twenty years, across many different student services at a variety of different levels.
A UX Community of Practice for Higher Education
This evolving article covers how we formed a grass roots Community of Practice (COP) for User Experience (UX) in Higher Education (HE). I will update it as the group grows to document what we did and what we learnt along the way.
My User Centred Design Process
Every user centred design professional has a goto set of tools and methods for getting the most from the tasks they have been set. This article provides a little insight into mine.
Upcoming articles
I have a few articles in progress at the moment covering a number of the different techniques I use as a UX research and design consultant. If you would like to know more about any of the topics listed below, please do get in touch.
- Empathy mapping
- User profiles
- Customer journey mapping
- User needs analysis
- Card sorting
- Tree testing
- Emotional response testing
- Comparative / Competitor analysis
- UX benchmarking
- Wireframing
- Prototyping
- Stakeholder interviews
- Usability testing
- Accessibility testing
- User behaviour analysis
- Search log analysis
- Sentiment analysis
- User testing recruitment
- Design critique workshops
- A/B testing
- Continuous improvement techniques
- Content strategy
- Design systems