Today we launched version one of the pattern library on ux.jisc.ac.uk – a collection of 30 key user interface elements. These should allow developers to quickly bring a consistent and high quality user experience to new and existing Jisc websites. When to drop the beta tag Working out when to lose the beta label is […]
Author: Richard West
Digital content and user experience manager in Jisc's group web team.
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Tweaking the IA
Help us improve the information architecture of jisc.ac.uk: take our tree test While running quite a few big projects* we’re also busy keeping the main Jisc website up to scratch. We’ve been working with internal teams to test and revise the IA of the site, in particular how we group our products and services. We’ve run public tree tests before […]
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Content strategy in Higher Education
Last week was IWMW and David Cornforth and I presented a workshop session on content strategy (resources and slides here). We asked attendees to write up their content problems on post-its and stick them on the ‘issues wall’. We filled it. The positives – we all get that content is important, critical. Otherwise our session wouldn’t […]
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IWMW 2014 – Content strategy
If you’re heading to Newcastle later this week for IWMW 2014 then do grab me and say hello. I’ll be up there with David Cornforth running a workshop on content strategy. We’ll be looking at practical tools and steps to help you get (and keep) your content focused on the user’s (and organisation’s) needs. We’ll […]
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Image info boxes
During the creation of the site lots of ideas came and went. Two of the little ones I’m pleased I pushed for were a ban on landing page carousels and the image info box. Out of stock Very early on @bash had the fantastic idea of making use of our own content on the site. We […]
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This week’s user testing
We put a lot of time, effort, thought and passion into how our new site turned out. There are features we argued for strongly. Design decisions we all agreed were essential. Labels that resonated so beautifully it amazed us they’d never been used before. And then we tested them with real people. If visitors don’t […]
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Arranging the new Jisc website
The new site has to be customer focused, accessible and helpful. If we achieve this a lot will be down to the site’s information architecture – how we organised our content and what labels (eg. ‘about us’) we used to describe it. After an exploratory set of user and stakeholder interviews we came up with some […]
One of our first steps when we started on the new site was to jot down some guidelines and ambitions for our work. In no small part inspired by the Government Digital Service* these should help us make the right decision, and keep us from getting lost down blind-alleys: Always put people first Set the […]
To general relief (and for some – deep frustration at wasted effort) the ICO softened their Cookie Law guidance last week around implied consent. Whether our fairly straight-forward approach on jisc.ac.uk is enough we’ll have to wait and see… Becoming a cookie cutter After an Attacat Cookie Audit we stripped out our more intrusive cookies*. We […]
As part of the upcoming development of jisc.ac.uk we’re running a quick survey to gauge where we are now. If you’ve used the site, and are happy to answer a few questions, you can take the survey now… …and along with being part of the future development of the site you’ll be in with a […]