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.