Article — — 100 words

Service design — User experience — User research

Work:

Screenshot of the remotely-held UX Glasgow meetup

This week I presented to the UX Glasgow community about our user research into the needs of students and staff working with course materials digitally at the University of Edinburgh. It was my first real experience of presenting to a live audience remotely.

Linknote — — 43 words

User experience — User research

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Contextual enquiry with members of staff working with course materials digitally — Website and Communications Blog

Staff foam board

As part of our comprehensive programme of user research in support of the Learn Foundations project, the User Experience Service has conducted contextual enquiry to better understand the contexts and needs of staff members working with Learn. This blog post summarises our findings.

Linknote — — 62 words

Information architecture — User experience — User research

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First click tests — building up the elements of user experience for Learn Foundations — Website and Communications Blog

First click heatmap

> We had developed an information architecture and tree tests as part of our programme of user research for Learn Foundations. The next step was to use first click tests to pit the new template against existing courses.

The latest post in my series for the Website and Communications blog about our user research work around the University of Edinburgh’s virtual learning environment.

Article — — 52 words

Service design — User experience — User research

Work:

Slides from my Edinburgh UX meetup talk on Monday 2 September 2019, about the user research we have been conducting around the needs of students and staff working with course materials digitally at the University of Edinburgh. See the more detailed blog posts about this project over at the Website and Communications team blog.

Note — — 96 words

Technology — User experience — User research

Work:

I’m doing a couple of talks this week. They are both about [the user research we’ve been doing for the Learn Foundations project](https://duncanstephen.net/tag/learn-foundations/).

This evening I will be presenting at the [Edinburgh UX monthly meetup](https://www.meetup.com/Edinburgh-User-Experience-Meetup/events/ghvkllyzlbjc/). It’s a friendly meetup and it’s free, so do come along if you’re interested.

Then on Wednesday I’ll be [presenting](https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2019/sessions/a-105/) with my colleagues Karen Howie and Paul Smyth at the [Association for Learning Technology (ALT) Annual Conference](https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2019/).

Linknote — — 63 words

User experience — User research

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Top tasks surveys have identified what really matters to students using Learn — Website and Communications Blog

Pie chart of students' top tasks in Learn

As part of our programme of user research in support of the Learn Foundations project, we have carried out a top tasks survey to understand what students need when accessing course materials online.

What we found was that students value three items much more than everything else. Those items are *all* to do with lectures.

See the full post to find out more.

Linknote — — 123 words

User experience — User research

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The elements of a better user experience in Learn — Website and Communications Blog

The sketch that started it all

As part of the Learn Foundations project, we have carried out a programme of quantitative research to ensure a user-centred approach to solution development.

The Learn Foundations project team wanted to develop a new template using a user-centred approach. This template would be designed to introduce more consistency between different courses in Learn. But it also had to support a diverse variety of needs across different courses, supporting different schools, colleges and teaching needs. It also had to be developed quickly.

We took inspiration from a classic user experience diagram to ensure this new template could be built on firm foundations.

This post introduces the steps we took. Forthcoming posts will describe each step in more detail and some of our key findings.

Linknote — — 88 words

Service design — User experience — User research

Work:

Interviews with students to understand users’ needs and contexts around Learn — Website and Communications Blog

Foam board summarising insights from interviews with students

Summarising the key findings from a set of user interviews I conducted with students on their needs around accessing course materials digitally. Just one of the strands of the Learn Foundations project, which I still have much more to write about.

After analysing and synthesising the insights gathered through the interviews, we built up a picture of how and why students’ experience with Learn varies throughout the year as students attempt to complete different tasks. This is presented as a semester in the life of students using Learn.