Linknote — — 63 words

User experience — User research

Work:

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 — — 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.

Linknote — — 102 words

Content design — User experience — Web

Encouraging self-service through improving content at the University of Edinburgh — Lauren Tormey — GatherContent

Diagram demonstrating process of continuous improvement

My awesome colleague Lauren Tormey wrote this blog post about a brilliant project she’s been involved in. She has been collaborating with our Information Services Helpline to reduce unnecessary support calls by iteratively improving content with a regular cycle of usability testing.

> Over two summers, we had done work to improve content related to getting a student ID card. This was another case of turning long pages with giant paragraphs into concise step-by-step pages.
>
> From July to September 2017, the IS Helpline received 433 enquires related to student cards. For this same period in 2018, they received 224, so the figure nearly halved. I repeat: halved.

Linknote — — 177 words

Digital — User experience — User research

Work:

User research into the needs of students and staff using Learn — Website and Communications Blog

Me running a workshop for Learn Foundations

Since September, my main focus at work has been to carry out a comprehensive programme of user research for a project aiming to improve services surrounding Blackboard Learn, the University of Edinburgh’s main virtual learning environment.

I wrote this blog post providing a high-level overview of all the work that’s taken place this academic year. More detailed blog posts about each of the strands of research will come in due course.

This is been a brilliant project to be involved in. We’ve been given a lot of time and freedom to do large amount of research in support of one of the university’s most important digital services, used daily by most of our students, and many staff members.

We have made some really important discoveries. This work is ensuring that improvements are based on a strong understanding of users’ behaviour and needs when working with course materials digitally.

Check out this video, where I describe the work and some of the findings in a bit more detail, and keep an eye out for the forthcoming blog posts.

Linknote — — 186 words

Technology — User experience — User research

Work:

Improving student experiences in Learn: usability testing showcase and workshop — Informatics Learning Technology Service

Prioritised usability issues

My colleague Alex Burford from the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics has written this great blog post about some usability testing we have conducted in support of the Learn Foundations project.

> I thoroughly enjoyed working with [Duncan Stephen](https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/duncan-stephen) on this mini project. The feedback was informative, encouraging, and a call to action. I’m looking forward to embedding similar practice across the School for alternative platforms for content delivery.

[You can read my own reflections on this work at the Website and Communications team blog](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/come-to-the-next-learn-usability-testing-showcase-on-29-march/).

Each month we are working with a different school to conduct usability testing in Learn, the virtual learning environment, to inform improvements to the Learn service.

This is just one strand of a huge amount of user research I’ve been carrying out for the [Learn Foundations](https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/website-communications/tag/learn-foundations/) project. It’s been a fascinating and very enjoyable project to work on. I’ve been pretty lax at writing about it yet — but I’ll be posting much more about it soon.

Linknote — — 83 words

User experience

Work:

UX Scotland 2018 write up

My colleagues and I have gathered together our thoughts on our highlights of the UX Scotland conference.

I am also in the process of writing up some further thoughts on most of the other sessions, which I will publish to the [University Website Programme blog](https://website-programme-blog.is.ed.ac.uk/) soon.

But in the meantime, find out about my top three sessions, and the things I intend to put into practice as a result of attending the conference.