Providing accessible digital solutions for our users at the University of Bristol
Recently, we received a support request to include the logo for a new Athena Swan bronze awardee. Attached to the ticket was an image file of the logo, which I’ve seen before, uploaded to many areas of the media library. I decided to take a closer look at all relevant school pages…
Continue reading: Standardising content assets for sustainable use
‘Just in case’ content is created or duplicated online, ‘just in case’ users might need it. Alex Saint, from the Current Students content team at the University, explains why sometimes less is more.
The ultimate goal for University webpages is that users can quickly and easily find the information they are looking for.
Yet one of the biggest challenges the Current Students content team faces is unnecessary and duplicate content – a historical issue at the University. Here’s why we might suggest removing content from your pages.
Digital sustainability is what we can do to reduce our impact on the planet’s resources. Not just at work, but in all areas of our lives where we use digital.
Many people assume that digital technology is ‘clean’ because it doesn’t create visible pollution. The internet is actually responsible for 4% of global carbon emissions – equivalent to the entire aviation industry.
Continue reading: Digital sustainability – why is it important and what are we doing?
In this post, our UX/UI Designer Jamie Forsyth discusses how the experiences we all create at the University succeed or fail. And how really nailing down who your ‘users’ are and what their needs are, will make their (and in turn, your) life easier.
Jamie also describes how we in the Digital Experience (DX) team can help you to understand your users better, and work with you to create experiences that really help them in what they’re trying to do.
Everything created at the University is experienced by someone. From social media posts to open day events, course web pages to annual lectures, student enrolment forms to civic engagement services. A user’s experience (UX) is at the heart of all these ‘things’.
If the appropriate audiences – your ‘users’ – for these experiences have been understood and prioritised, then said ‘thing’ will almost always be a success – potentially a resounding one! If not, then unless you strike it extremely lucky, it won’t be a success.
Continue reading: Creating experiences – our UX service offering to you
Joshua Morris (Senior Front End Developer) explains what a design system is, why you should use one, and what the University has been doing to develop its own design system.
TLDR: A design system is a complete toolkit for managing design at scale, providing reusable ‘components’ and ‘patterns’ along with accompanying standards and governance.
Recently there has been a lot of discussion about how large organisations manage digital design at scale. Many of these organisations have brand guidelines created for printed media such as leaflets and flyers.
They also usually have large digital estates comprised of thousands of pages of content, presented in various ways such as different website page layouts and applications.
Digital teams responsible for the estate often try to apply strict print guidelines to this mixture of content, in a waterfall model, with varying degrees of success. Digital teams make their way through their digital estate updating brand, and then when print guidelines are updated, they restart.
As digital teams are generally smaller, how can you efficiently roll out and maintain a consistent brand across your digital estate?
Introducing a design system – a complete toolkit for managing design at scale.
Timea Wilson reflects on her first four months working with the University’s Digital Experience team as the Senior Digital Delivery and Performance Manager.
Reflecting on my journey so far within the Digital Experience team, I’m eager to share our progress amid challenges and our commitment to driving positive change. Here are four things that have made an impression on me so far:
Continue reading: Understanding the inner workings: the Digital Experience team’s impact
Digital Marketing Officer Rosie Morse explains the SEO work she undertook to support improvements to Bristol Dental School‘s section of our website.
This year, over a third of the traffic to the University of Bristol website came from search engines. And yet, organic search is often overlooked as a marketing channel.
In 2023, the Dental School webpages were reviewed and improved in line with the opening of its new school location. An external agency led on user research, the Digital Experience team did the content design, and I provided some SEO insights to support the project – with the goal of increasing organic search traffic to the Dental School webpages.
Continue reading: Boosting organic search traffic to the Dental School webpages
The next post in a series of Week Notes from our Deputy Director of Digital Experience, Rhiannon Davies.
Find out more about what ‘week notes’ and ‘working in the open’ are, and why they’re great.
Data and Analytics has definitely been the theme for this week, both in terms of things I’ve been working on, and things I’ve been thinking about…
The first post in a series of Week Notes from our Deputy Director of Digital Experience, Rhiannon Davies.
Find out more about what ‘week notes’ and ‘working in the open’ are, and why they’re great.
Coming back from summer holiday last week, distinctly autumnal weather, a slightly confusing three day week, and waiting for a new boss to start, has meant the last week has felt like some kind of weird twilight time before the new academic year kicks off. A great moment for a bit of reflection.
Continue reading: Week Notes: looking backwards and looking forwards
In this second of two posts on campaign landing pages (read part one), Josh Morris (Senior Front End Developer) and Jamie Forsyth (UX/UI Designer) discuss using a sprint approach to create campaign landing pages at the University.
We brought together experts to work in a ‘sprint style’ fashion over three weeks, aiming to deliver campaign landing pages that could be built and maintained within our institutional content management system (CMS), TerminalFour Site Manager.
Our experts included marketers, external agencies, product managers, content designers, user interface/experience designers, developers and other stakeholders.
Continue reading: Building campaign landing pages, part 2: a sprint to deliver