Categories
Accessibility Social media Usability User experience

The value of online video subtitles

Adding subtitles or captions can make your online videos far more accessible and understandable – and it’s much easier and quicker to do this than you may think. Comprehension, concentration and clarity An Ofcom study found that of 7.5m people who regularly use subtitles in the UK, only 1.5m of these are deaf or hard […]

Categories
User experience

Conducting a remote empathy mapping workshop

As a small, agile, multi skilled and geographically dispersed team that works on multiple products, building a shared understanding of needs and priorities for our work is key. Furthermore building empathy with our users empowers us to be better designers. “In the end, design is all about empathy. This is what leads to creativity, inspiration […]

Categories
Design Development Mobile Strategy User experience

Responsive web design (RWD)

“Day by day, the number of devices, platforms, and browsers that need to work with your site grows. Responsive web design represents a fundamental shift in how we’ll build websites for the decade to come.”- Jeffrey Veen What is responsive web design? RWD is a web design technique aimed at creating sites that provide a […]

Categories
Content Design Mobile Strategy User experience

Designing mobile first

Ever heard comments that have gone something like… “The sort of tasks that users are performing are too complicated for mobile” “Analytics show our primary audience is desktop” “Users only want a desktop site” When desktop use vastly outweighs mobile it seems obvious to prioritise that as the primary medium. And following a strategy that […]

Categories
Design Development Pattern library User experience

Creating a pattern index

Following on from my previous post on taking a framework agnostic approach to documenting UI patterns I wanted to talk about creating a pattern index as a counterpart to a pattern library, or as a useful tool for anyone designing within a large web estate. The spark As with many things, an innocuous looking question […]

Categories
Content Design Pattern library Uncategorized User experience

Documenting UI design patterns

From the very beginning of the Jisc user experience and design project we knew that we didn’t want our pattern library to be just another framework. Bootstrap is widely used across our business and it’s fantastic for rapid development, but by its very nature it’s completely open to individuals interpretation of how to apply it. […]

Categories
Development Pattern library User experience

Launching the pattern library

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 […]

Categories
Content Design User experience Website

What’s in a name

Following on from my previous post I wanted to explain the logic for the change of name on the project formally known as global experience language.   In CX partners initial assessment of our web estate they recommended that “Service mode sites should be made to feel consistent with other Jisc services using modules from […]

Categories
User experience

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 […]

Categories
Design Strategy User experience Website

Building a global experience language for Jisc

First up let me introduce myself as I’m new here. I’m Benjamin (not to be confused with Ben) and I have joined the team on secondment as user experience (UX) specialist. The main challenge in my new role is to lead on the creation of a global experience language (GEL) for Jisc – so that’s […]