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…
How we combined data and knowledge to make a category page work better for users.
A category page (sometimes called ‘section homepage’ or just ‘homepage’ here at the University) fulfils many functions on a website. It showcases the service, is usually the most visited page, and is the one page above all others that senior staff want a say in shaping.
The real purpose of this page is often lost in the ‘make it look dynamic!’ hype. As all good content designers know, websites exist to give our users what they need, and the number one place to do this is the service category page. And yet at the University we often find category pages are plagued with issues such as:
Continue reading: Easy improvements for users of the Students’ Health Service
Organisation charts presented in PDF format are one of the worst offenders when it comes to accessibility. Rob, from our Content Design team, explains how he turned one such chart into accessible HTML content.
When the bristol.ac.uk site was audited by Government Digital Services last year, one of the main issues that we had to fix was inaccessible PDFs.
PDFs pose particular problems for anyone with accessibility needs. It is possible to painstakingly add all of the structural tags for titles and headings so that the PDF passes accessibility criteria, but it’s unlikely that the effort will pay off; if someone finds 99% of PDFs that they encounter inaccessible, they’re not going to take the risk of opening another.
Continue reading: PDFs and accessibility, part 1: making our organisation chart accessible
Web analytics are powerful tools. But, say Digital officer Geraint Northam and UX officer Becca Edmeads, you’ve got to know how to use them.
Most of us use analytics unquestioningly. We don’t stop to think how accurate they might be, let alone what they might actually mean.
It’s important to recognise that analytics don’t give the full picture – they’re an indication of patterns of behaviour or trends. We need to educate ourselves on why the data might not be entirely accurate.Continue reading: A more meaningful use of analytics
