Article — — 1,284 words

Service design — User research

Work:

Adapted from a post originally published on the University of Edinburgh Website and Communications blog. Over the summer we ran co-design events involving over 100 participants from a variety of areas of the university. This work has given us a fresh perspective on the range of web activities undertaken across the university, and is informing […]

Linknote — — 112 words

Technology — Web

Underscores, optimisation and arms races

The story of how one character — the underscore (_) — provided an early glimpse of the problems we now face with dominant tech firms exerting their power over the web.

We found ourselves resistant to what felt like a coercive effect of Google’s rising domination, especially since Google’s own Blogger platform was a competitor of ours. Our expression of that frustration was expressed by a debate over a single character: We were using _ because we thought it looked nicer, so why should we change to – just because Google liked it better? Weren’t they supposed to adapt to what we published on the web?

Article — — 1,572 words

Content design — Digital — User experience

Work:

Adapted from a post originally published on the University of Edinburgh Website and Communications blog. We have recently completed a six month collaboration with University Human Resources Services (UHRS) which has delivered a fledgling digital strategy, developed new content management processes and skills within their team, and rationalised priority areas of their website. Human Resources […]

Article — — 1,021 words

Information architecture — User experience — Web

Work:

Adapted from a post originally published on the University of St Andrews Digital Communications team blog. The first project of the digital communications team is a relaunch of the website for prospective students. This project began about a year ago, long before the digital communications team was formed. Lean sessions In early 2013, members of […]