Digital Marketing & Communications http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital Building better products and services Fri, 22 Dec 2017 11:41:45 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.4 Creating, structuring and analysing our student Induction content http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/12/22/creating-structuring-and-analysing-our-student-induction-content/ http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/12/22/creating-structuring-and-analysing-our-student-induction-content/#respond Fri, 22 Dec 2017 10:30:19 +0000 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/?p=5011 Running from around the start of August until the end of October, the Undergraduate Induction period is one of the most important times in our editorial calendar.

It's a time of high-stress for a lot of new students. Many are nervous about leaving home and desperate to make sure they're prepared for their new life at university, so it's crucial that we provide information that helps them be in the right place at the right time.

Over the past two years, we've done this through the Undergraduate and Postgraduate Induction Collection pages.

Starting with people’s needs

In 2016, we transitioned undergraduate and postgraduate induction content into Content Publisher. The first stage of this process was to find out how new students were using our content and what they needed to do with it. We did this by holding some user story workshops with stakeholders to find out what they saw as the important things for students to know. We then looked at the data from the existing induction content and combined our findings.

What we found was that students mostly wanted practical information and guidance about things like collecting their room keys and finding the Student's Union. The more pastoral content, which covered topics like homesickness and making friends, was not so well received in this format.

As a result of this, we created practical pages like:

We didn't ignore the pastoral side of coming to university, but we kept these pages focused on specific user needs, covering topics like how peer mentors can help you settle into uni life and how to make the most of your time at uni.

There are also things we, the University, need new students to do, like register, get vaccinated, and pay their fees - important stuff. So a lot of the content we created and transitioned for Induction was about these things. In those cases, even though the type of content was different, our user-first approach was not. The University needs students to do these things, but we still had to make sure that the content was written with the students' needs in mind. Their need is to find this information at the right time and to be able to understand it and act on it.

Content when it's needed

The best way to help people to be in the right place at the right time is to give them information in the right place and at the right time.

Throughout the Induction period, we restructured the Collection pages so that priority pages rose to the top, adding relevant pages when they were needed, relegating or removing any that had lost relevance.

To do this, we created content calendars for the undergraduate and postgraduate Collections. These showed where on each Collection we should pin every page of Induction content, and when.

Those early user story workshops we held with stakeholders fed into this. We plotted the user stories they wrote on a timeline, working out what information was important for students at certain points in the Induction period.

Since then, we've worked with colleagues from around the University as part of the Induction Operations Group, making sure that the calendar was correct so that students would see the information they needed, when they needed it.

A screenshot of a spreadsheet listing Induction web pages and their URLs
Keeping track of Induction content updates

Working with the experts

While we were creating content, we were also been listening to our colleagues about how to approach Induction. As I mentioned, we were part of the Induction Operations Group, a regular gathering of student induction experts from all the faculties, the School of Management, Student Services, the Student's Union (including the SU President), the International Relations Office, and others.

These meetings were really useful in understanding more about what the web content needed to do from the University's point of view, but they were also an opportunity to share our work with colleagues, take their feedback on board, and review our content accordingly.

This year, through the Induction Operations Group, we also worked with colleagues from Student Services who ran a trial of 'Student Welcome'. This is a platform that lets you track a user's progress through content pages and quizzes so you can check how many of your users looked through the content you provided.

As we already had a lot of the necessary content on the website, we worked with Student Services to avoid duplication and reviewed the Student Welcome content to maintain similar tone and style with the website.

Digging into the data

Over the last two years, we've worked hard to make sure that our Induction content (and the rest!) is clear, user-focused, and accessible. Sadly, because of the way we've restructured the Induction content, it's impossible to get like-for-like comparisons between most pages. For example, we can't say that the new Fresher's Week pages are performing better or worse than the old ones because they're structured in a completely different way.

Having said that, we can see comparisons between the pages for some of the key tasks that students need to do during the Induction period.

University registration

Comparing the pages that linked to University registration in 2015 and 2017, we saw a slight drop in unique views, from 37,267 to 34,656. We also saw a rise in bounce rate, from 11% in 2015 to 61% in 2017. The page itself was active throughout the Induction period, but for some of this time it was just a holding page as the registration platform itself was not active.

What we can take from this is that having a holding page for a service that's not live can mess up your data! Next year, we might want to leave the page unpublished until the registration platform is live.

Vaccinations

From 1 August to 1 October 2015, the page about vaccinations for new students had 2,467 unique views and a bounce rate of 72%. This year, the new page got 7,286 unique views, and the bounce rate increased to 88%.

In this case, the increased bounce rate could be a sign that the page is performing well. Near the top of the page is a clear list of the vaccinations students should have before coming to university. The high bounce rate suggests that users got the information they needed and were able to leave the page without further actions.

The list of vaccinations new students should have before coming to University
Content, clearly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heathrow pickup

The new page about the Heathrow pickup for international students also seems to be performing better than the old one.

Between 1 June and 1 October 2015, the Heathrow pickup page had 1,647 unique views and a bounce rate of 57%. This is compared to 4,196 uniques and a bounce rate of 43% for the 2017 Heathrow pickup page.

The low bounce rate is a good sign here because the point of the page is to encourage people to book themselves onto the service. Coupled with an average time of 2 minutes 37 on the page, and we can tell that people were reading the content and interacting with the page to achieve their goal.

We also promoted the service on Facebook and Sina Weibo (Chinese social media) with a gif linking to the new page. Here's the English version...

A gif giving information about the Heathrow pickup service

...and the Chinese translation.

A gif giving information about the Heathrow pickup service in Chinese

Looking ahead

Now that we have two full years of data from the new pages, we'll be able to review how the content is performing year-on-year and make further improvements ahead of next year's Induction period. We'll also continue to work with our colleagues and our users, looking at how we can make improvements based on their experiences and feedback.

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Landing pages of hope and glory http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/12/12/landing-pages-of-hope-and-glory/ http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/12/12/landing-pages-of-hope-and-glory/#comments Tue, 12 Dec 2017 16:05:48 +0000 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/?p=5012 Permission to land

In July 2017, based on the feedback the team has received over the past year, we made the decision to improve our landing pages. What we now have is the culmination of an intensive project with major contributions from the different disciplines within Digital. This is how we developed the new template.

Over several iterations, the design team put together a template using movable and interchangeable strata to highlight the key items related to a department. Development work took place in late September. To do this, we exiled ourselves into a small room that would later become known as the "Dev Shed". Fuelled by tea and optimism, we took a week and most of a whiteboard to settle on a final design.

A whiteboard showing a data model
Landing page data model (revision 84)

As part of the improvements to our website, we’ve been working towards a new, modular, way of combining content which will mean that individual components can be reused across different types of pages. This will reduce code duplication and allow other content types to follow the same path in the future.

As a way to handle different groups of content as a common "Container" object, we settled on Single Table Inheritance (or STI).

Based on the design, we identified four sections - Pinned Items, Events, Awards & Accolades, and Contact information - that share a database table and basic fields such as Title and Summary. Each section could then be sub-classed to allow for its own particular logic.

On approach

Despite a few snags, the STI approach has worked well, with Rails making the process relatively painless! First, we built the backend. It took a long time, and much code, but we got there in the end. Keeping to our plan for a modular system, we built each section as its own component and combined them onto a single form.

When we'd finished, we had a 34 A4-page-long form. We decided this wasn't ideal from a user perspective.

At this point we split our resources. One of us (Justin) began working on modifying the publisher to generate a page from the raw data, while the other (Chris) took on the not-insignificant task of compressing our unwieldy form into something logical, functional and - most important of all - usable.

A screenshot of the Landing Page editor form
The new landing page form - designed with usability in mind.

We were able to build on some previous work on movable objects that had already been implemented on Team pages. Users can already reorder the members on a Team page by dragging and dropping. The JavaScript driving this provided us with a nice template for the Landing Page work. The end result uses JavaScript to rip out any empty form sections and restyle the full ones. The jQueryUI sortable plugin then lets the user drag-and-drop each section into place. JavaScript buttons add new sections, or let you remove old ones. Design stepped in to make sure each movable chunk looked and felt connected and manageable. As a final tweak, we added CSS toggles to let each large section be collapsed down to a slimline block for clearer dragging.

The job of updating the publisher has been made easier by our recent experience with course pages. Most of the work we’ve put into the publishing of course pages has been transferable to landing pages as a baseline. This can then be updated to meet the requirements of the new pages. Both courses and landing pages share our new Lens design system and similar templates. In fact, the landing page is the first content type to make the jump from our previous design system (Origins) to Lens. The process we’ve devised in developing landing pages (with a few tweaks) will form the template for work on future content types.

Cabin crew

Each member of the design and development teams has discussed every aspect of the design, layout and logic throughout the process. From discussing early hand-drawn sketches through to determining conditions for separators to appear on pinboards, the conversation has always been positive and collaborative.

A sketch of the new landing page design
One of the sketches which informed the design of new landing pages

When the time came for the new landing pages to go live, we celebrated with a dragon roar (as is the custom)! Dragon activations usually only occur when large projects have shipped, so they often represent an important milestone for the team. In this case, it represented four months of work across multiple disciplines, involving every member of the digital team through the stages of discussion, planning, design, development and testing.

At the gate

The key thing that we’ve taken away from this work is that it was more extensive than we thought it would be - our editor updates alone totalled 5,000 new lines of code (and 39 deletions) across over 100 files! As this is the first content type we built with this approach, this was to be expected. Future content types will share code which has been added here and so shouldn't need quite so many additions to get up and running.

A special mention (and possibly a medal) should go to Lizz, who had to review every single line of code and somehow did not lose her mind in the process (or if she did, she's hiding it very well).

The whole team can be very proud of what we’ve achieved with new landing pages. This work will serve as a good foundation for updating our other content types in the future and we look forward to seeing what our users produce on their new pages.

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One Hour Upgrade - November 2017 edition http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/12/05/one-hour-upgrade-november-2017-edition/ http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/12/05/one-hour-upgrade-november-2017-edition/#respond Tue, 05 Dec 2017 10:01:51 +0000 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/?p=5022 All change! At the first One Hour Upgrade to be slotted into a new sprint cadence, we took the opportunity to go back to basics. No longer spread across two days, these sessions have reverted to their original format, where we fit both planning and execution into a single day.

There were a few absentees but, despite diminished numbers, the stats were impressive:

  • 12 participants, one of whom had never experienced a One Hour Upgrade before
  • 18 individual stories added to the backlog in the planning session
  • 9 stories were popular enough to be moved to to-do
  • 4 cross-disciplinary pairs and 5 lone wolves *

* Suzanna put her name to two different stories, 1 solo and 1 paired

What was started

  • Lizz and Suzanna took a look at documenting the process of working with Flow, our editorial calendar tool, and re-writing instructions for updating the home page
  • Tom Trentham put on his accept/reject hat and worked through previous OHU stories needing a final review
  • A fresh addition to the team, Jenny started pulling together a glossary of terms used in our content publishing tool, Typecase
  • Justin and Dan started redesigning the shipping dashboard displayed on the office monitor

What got done

  • Tegan applied the latest (and greatest) flexbox styling to the courses landing page
  • Chris sped up our tests by deleting some redundant fixtures. The resulting speed gain was measured in milliseconds but every little counts!
  • Rhian and Suzanna scrutinised the course editor screens, looking for missing or erroneous microcopy
  • Gabriel added some Hollywood glitz to proceedings, pitching a short film documenting the development of Typecase to the Head of Digital, Rich. It went well and the cameras should be rolling soon

What we learned

  • One Hour Upgrade fits nicely into our new sprint cadence
  • People are still struggling to come up with upgrade ideas 'on the spot'. Justin and Dan, the OHU admin team, should actively promote the Trello board for stashing future session ideas

What's next?

The next One Hour Upgrade will take place on Friday 5th January 2018.

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We're launching new style landing pages http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/11/17/were-launching-new-style-landing-pages/ http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/11/17/were-launching-new-style-landing-pages/#comments Fri, 17 Nov 2017 08:33:28 +0000 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/?p=4989 One of the first tasks the new Digital team has been working to improve is the website’s landing page design and functionality.

Landing pages act as a starting point for visitors arriving on bath.ac.uk and play an important role in the recruitment of students and promotion of our research activity to academics, other universities and industry partners.

Background

Designed in 2015 and launched in early 2016 by the original Digital team, the previous landing page was redesigned to make it easier for visitors to find our content on devices like mobile phones and improve the site’s findability in search engines like Google.

The template created made it easier for people who write for the website (we call them authors) to create, manage and publish content without any knowledge of coding - marking a massive step forward from our old Content Management System and website.

New CMS vs. Old CMS

A modern look and feel

The new landing page builds from our work on Course search and continues the roll-out of a modern look and feel designed to engage our visitors further.

A great online experience is critical if the University wants to recruit high-quality students and help people to discover our research activity. The new design also needs to support staff to do things online more quickly.

The improvements we’re making

Here are some of the improvements we’re making to the landing pages:

Hero

The page includes an optional image called a "hero" across the top of the page, similar to Course search. Departments can use this to give a sense of identity to their landing page.  If there is no hero the title and description of the department will appear at the top of page.

Optional hero image

Navigation

The page includes improvements to site and section navigation which will create predictable ways get to information and complete tasks on the website. This means people will be able to find things more easily on bath.ac.uk, much like when you go to a library you know how to find the books that you need.

The new global and section navigation

Design

We’re introducing new design elements which will make it easier for visitors to identify different types of content, individual content items appear like cards on the page. The aim is to reduce the time it takes for people to find information on a page.

New event element

Consistency

We don’t want people to relearn how pages behave when they come to the website - it's the same kind of frustration you feel when a supermarket changes the order of its aisles. The design elements will help to establish common interactions and workflows for visitors as they journey through the website.

Drag and Drop

For authors who use the Content Publisher, we are also introducing a new “drag and drop” feature. You’ll be able to use this feature first on landing pages, and we’ll be rolling out this feature to other templates shortly. Drag and drop will help to reduce the time it takes an author to maintain a page.

Drag and drop

Measuring success

Another reason we’ve built the new website is to make it easier to gather data and get feedback from users, so we can analyse performance and respond to visitors feedback.

Collecting this information helps everyone who is responsible for digital content to understand what works and what doesn’t work for our users. By doing this, we can make the website more effective by identifying actions that will make a difference - helping to focus our efforts.

One of the most rewarding parts of building the new landing page for the team has been making the changes based on data and user feedback we’ve gathered.

How the pages have performed

Over the past year, we’ve been measuring the effectiveness of landing pages. The good news is that they have performed exceptionally well.

Based on external traffic from 31 October 2016 to 1 November 2017 the average bounce rate was 23.63% and average exit rate (visitors who had previously visited another page before exiting the site) was 14.96%.

The majority of visitors, for example, prospective students who landed on the page, went on to find out about more information or completed another task - this is exactly what we want people to do.

Feedback from people who write for the website has also been positive, although we still have a lot to learn. The good thing is they are finding it easier to do their jobs - they can now create, manage and publish content using a simple and intuitive interface which helps to focus content rather than code.

Improving measurement

We’re also increasing the number of metrics we record to improve our understanding of how well pages perform. For instance, we’ll be able to report on how far people scroll which shows us how engaged they are with our content.

This data combined with our existing data set will help Digital, and marketing and communications colleagues across the University to make better decisions about user experience design as well as the content we create.

What happens next

We want visitors and authors to benefit from these changes as soon as possible. As a result, we'll be working closely with Bath's wider digital community over the next few weeks to roll-out the new look and feel landing page.

Our next task is to work on a template that will make it easier to market the University’s facilities, services and courses. Colleagues will also be able to use this template to raise awareness about a particular campaign or issue. After that, we will look at next set of similar templates to see how we can improve them.

Grouping similar templates and rolling out the new look and feel to pages that are in those templates means we’ll be able to develop them more quickly, helping to keep up the pace of change.

If you want to find out more about the improvements the whole digital community at Bath is making, take a look our Roadmap and check out our backlog of work.

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Digital Roadmap quarter three delivery highlights http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/10/13/digital-roadmap-quarter-three-delivery-highlights/ http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/10/13/digital-roadmap-quarter-three-delivery-highlights/#respond Fri, 13 Oct 2017 13:28:59 +0000 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/?p=4965 It’s been another busy quarter for both the Digital team and colleagues from around the University. This quarter we delivered the following:

Doctoral College

We have launched the new online presence for the Doctoral College providing information for both current and prospective doctoral students.

Prospective applicants and students will now be able to find all the information they need to about the Doctoral College, including; how to apply for a postgraduate research course, how to get here, induction information and more about our partnerships and collaborations

Undergraduate Induction

We worked with a range of subject experts to launch an induction collection for 2017 student intake.

Visitors will be able to find all the information they need to enjoy a smooth welcome to studying at Bath including; what to bring, what living in halls is like, how to get around and how to access University systems.

Postgraduate Taught Courses

Working closely with the faculties and the new postgraduate admissions team, we have added postgraduate taught courses to the Course Search. This means we have been able to simplify the presentation of information about our taught postgraduate offering and provide an improved destination for prospective postgraduate students.

Filtered Course Search

We have added filtering to our Course Search.

It is now even easier for prospective undergraduate and postgraduate students to relevant information about the courses we offer.

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Seven things I discovered at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2017 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/09/29/seven-things-i-discovered-at-the-institutional-web-management-workshop-2017/ http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/09/29/seven-things-i-discovered-at-the-institutional-web-management-workshop-2017/#respond Fri, 29 Sep 2017 08:00:50 +0000 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/?p=4949 This summer, myself and colleagues from across the University took a trip over to Canterbury for the annual Institutional Web Management Workshop conference. We arrived hungry for innovation (and cake) and we left full of ideas (but still hungry for cake).

The Institutional Web Management Workshop logo

Having a crisis is good

There seems to be a bit of a crisis across the higher education sector at the moment. Brexit, new consumer legislation and even just basic technical infrastructures are in some cases struggling to keep up. It feels like the changes are accelerating and we’re all struggling to keep on top of them.

But the crisis isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is forcing a change and problems have to be dealt with. What we had before might have been ok, but it was never perfect and with higher fees come higher expectations.

Andrew Millar, Head of Web Services at the University of Dundee, made me think of this in his talk when he highlighted that their approach to digital content was broken. Not once, not twice, but thrice. In short:

  • we have more (and more) people creating more (and more) content and we need to provide better tools to enable them to do that
  • our ‘super’ web designs from the past aren’t cutting it anymore
  • the infrastructure we have still works, but it isn’t getting us where we need to go

He highlighted how it’s no longer about fixing one of these problems. We have to tackle them all, and a crisis is a good catalyst for that.

Google is coming

We need to be thinking about what is around the corner. Right now, we’re getting our content sorted for mobile and optimised for search, but we need to be aware of what is coming next.

Voice and home assistants are on the rise and we need to make sure that we are agile enough to adapt our content to take advantage of this (just in case they take over the world).

Do your user testing with no more than five people

The number 5 on a blue background | Photo by Ryan Johns (https://unsplash.com/photos/0X7ZNRcBT-k) on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com)
Photo by Ryan Johns on Unsplash.

There was an interesting report by the Nielson Norman Group on why you only need to test with five users that I was unaware of. In the report, they highlight that it takes around 15 usability tests to highlight all the problems with your design. They advocate however, that testing with five users is more beneficial.

How so? Well by testing with five users, you should find that 85% of the problems will be highlighted. Any additional testing is likely to repeat those same issues (as well as some new ones).

The remaining issues can be highlighted through further testing, but only once you have iterated on the design. This enables you to gain more value from each test and put better resource into testing more designs, rather than storing it up for one mega test.

Group review your user testing

Alberto Gugliemi, Web Editor at the University of Birmingham, provided a thorough overview of a usability testing framework in his workshop. The framework he used had been adapted from the work of usability guru Steve Krug.

He introduced a debrief session after the user testing to help prioritise the digital team’s work after the tests. This involved getting staff together to:

  • watch the usability video (an edited version) and ask attendees to indicate the top three issues
  • compile the issues
  • plot the issues in a prioritisation matrix

Becky Garner has covered this in more detail in her blog post.

Adapt military strategy for digital governance

Spitfire plane flying | Photo by paul jespers (https://unsplash.com/photos/HKqLX9NTtKc) on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText)
Photo by paul jespers on Unsplash.

Gareth Edwards, Digital Manager and Strategist at University of Greenwich, provided a comprehensive summary of digital governance and the issues faced. He likened this to the dowding system used in the Battle of Britain.

He highlighted that in the battle, there was a clear chain of command but also empowerment across the military. Central teams were in charge of strategy, while local teams were empowered to employ tactics. He illustrated how the same techniques could be applied to digital governance, by:

  • controlling roles and strategy centrally
  • providing the right tools and information to local teams
  • trusting the people on the spot to make decisions

Most importantly, we need to provide the right information to the right people (not all the information).

Be ambitious

Matthew Castle and Ruth Mason from the University of Oxford summarised how they were taking a unique approach to managing the large volume of website requests they receive. They highlighted the vast number of projects that were going to local digital agencies rather than being built internally.

They have invested in supporting Oxford Mosaic, which provides a simple(ish) framework for staff to develop their own web presence online. The sites are also responsive, which provides some futureproofing.

They have made a selection of these sites available for viewing.

We’re doing well

Paul Boag spoke about some of the work he has been doing with a number of public and private sector organisations.

He might say this to everyone, but he said we (higher education) are doing well, really well at the moment, and that we need to stop being so modest (that’s nice). Digital is something everyone is adapting to, and even though it might not feel like it, we’re doing well.

He also spoke about why some digital teams work well and why others don’t. It’s good.

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One Hour Upgrade - September 2017 edition http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/09/26/one-hour-upgrade-september-2017-edition/ http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/09/26/one-hour-upgrade-september-2017-edition/#respond Tue, 26 Sep 2017 15:00:11 +0000 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/?p=4945 The stats
  • 11 participants
  • 17 stories added to the OHU backlog
  • 12 stories voted through to To-do
  • 9 stories attempted
  • 2 stories saw cross-disciplinary pair working
  • 1 development environment annihilated

What got done

  • Tegan and Rod F reorganised the various digital Bath logos into a single source, to make finding the right logo a more straightforward task
  • Sean updated the Delete page on Content Publisher to include the URL of each page - this will make deleting pages with shared titles a lot easier to manage
  • Justin K moved the 'New User' button in Content Publisher to the top of the user form, so admins no longer need to scroll past aaaaall of the users in order to add a new one
  • Dan composed a definitive front-end testing checklist to ensure that future reviews are as thorough as possible, pages perform as expected on different browsers and accessibility standards are met
  • Lizz and Gabriel worked on quality of life improvements to Course Publisher by updating how assessment methods are ordered in both the editor and on published course pages

What was started

  • Chris began looking at ways to speed up the test suite for Content Publisher - unfortunately, this work was cut short due to an "unwise upgrade" which resulted in the loss of his development environment - priorities changed at this point
  • Tom T investigated improvements to security aspects of Content Publisher
  • Tom D looked into using the office whiteboard for displaying internal news, release information and upgrades
  • Suzanna began working on a plan to better organise Digital's content on Flickr

What we learnt

  • Not every suggestion made in a Linux terminal should be adhered to
  • It is possible to produce and review small quality of life code changes within one hour

What's next?

The next One Hour Upgrade is scheduled for Friday 27 October.

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So long, Digital http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/08/04/so-long-digital/ http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/08/04/so-long-digital/#comments Fri, 04 Aug 2017 08:34:49 +0000 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/?p=4928 I joined the Digital Marketing & Communications team 3.5 years ago as a Content Producer. Last year, I began a new role as Junior Developer. And after today, I will be leaving the team and the University for pastures new.

What drew me here was the chance to work with and learn from an experienced and enthusiastic team of professionals. I don't think I could have gotten much luckier on that front, as my mind was immediately blown.

The joy of working in a well-structured sprint, rather than constant fire-fighting. Collaborating with developers, designers, content professionals and subject matter experts. Making decisions and building services based on what our users need, and backing that up with data and research. It was a completely different way of working, and it felt great.

The team has seen a lot of change in the last few years, and it's been fantastic to watch (and help) the website transform from dated and difficult into modern and useful. I've been lucky to get to make some pretty cool stuff, and work with some very talented people (both past and present members of the team).

I'll miss a lot of things about working here, but highlights have included:

  • Show & Tell
  • the Dragon of Deployment
  • group outings to yoga class at the Sports Training Village
  • the team reordering themselves based on outfit colour during standup
  • going for a nice walk in the woods surrounding campus
  • beta badges (I'm particularly proud of my creepy-crawly ones)
  • lunchtime board games
  • the improbable popularity of the custom :gourd: emoji on our team Slack

While it's always sad to say goodbye, I know I'll be taking all the lessons I've learned here on to other jobs. And I'm looking forward to seeing what the team gets up to next.

Fortunately there's still time for one more Schwartz lunch before I go. Thanks, everyone – it's been a blast.

If you'd like to keep in touch (please do!) I'm on Twitter at @iris.

Toy dragon wearing a knitted jumper
The Dragon of Deployment's woolly jumper – my finest One Hour Upgrade contribution.
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Resetting our digital principles http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/07/28/resetting-our-digital-principles/ http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/07/28/resetting-our-digital-principles/#respond Fri, 28 Jul 2017 15:26:08 +0000 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/?p=4902 Lots of organisations, including government, health care and commercial business, use digital principles to help guide development.

Our digital principles not only describe how we work with each other but also how we work with colleagues from across the University.

Over the past three years, we have used a set of principles as a true north, helping us to focus on what’s important.

As the pace of digital transformation continues to accelerate driven by new technologies and devices, adopting a standard approach is becoming increasingly important for digital communities of practice.

This is particularly important in organisations where content creation and development are devolved. Shared standards help teams to collaborate and create joined up experiences for users.

Over the last few months, we've been through a period of change. As a result, we decided it was a good time to review our principles.

Today, we are releasing a new set of principles based on our original ones - some are more familiar than others.

1. Start with people’s needs

Build successful products and services that meet user needs, so that people have a reason to use them.

  • find out what users need to do
  • think about the whole experience
  • learn about the market and technology
  • understand the business goals

2. Use data to make decisions

Make better design and technical choices about how we build products and services by using data.

  • listen to people’s feedback
  • learn from what people do, not what they say they do
  • monitor changes in technology that affect how people use our products and services
  • measure the effectiveness of what we build

3. Advocate standards and structure

Use shared standards and structure to make it easier to collaborate and build products and services that work well with other platforms.

  • agree standard ways of working with colleagues
  • adopt industry standards
  • use structured content so the information can be reused
  • advocate the use of shared standards and structure across the organisation

4. Make things simple and intuitive

Make products and services simple and intuitive so people can use them successfully.

  • follow a consistent visual design
  • choose the right tone, voice and style
  • establish common interactions and workflows
  • use the most effective channel
  • give information at the point it’s needed
  • design for people whatever their background, circumstance, skills or subject knowledge

5. Release iteratively and often

Put products and services in people’s hands quickly so we can test our thinking and make adjustments based on data.

  • break down projects into smaller parts so they are easier to deliver
  • prioritise what needs to be delivered
  • experiment
  • release quickly, learn fast and make improvements

6. Provide support

Support the technology that runs our platforms and help colleagues who look after services to make sure that users have the best experience.

  • document how things work
  • keep our infrastructure up-to-date
  • provide support where and when it’s needed
  • train colleagues to make the best use of the products we’ve built

7. Share

Build better products and services by sharing what we’ve learnt with colleagues.

  • talk about what we’re making as we make it and explain why
  • put in the effort to help and encourage each other
  • listen to colleagues
  • make time for the community by actively contributing

After reviewing the principles, we want to go one step further. We are sharing them with our colleagues from the University's digital community and inviting them to contribute to making them even better - to get involved email r.w.prowse@bath.ac.uk.

Our Digital principles have been inspired by GDS and Co-op

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Experiencing work experience http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/07/21/experiencing-work-experience/ http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/2017/07/21/experiencing-work-experience/#comments Fri, 21 Jul 2017 10:01:05 +0000 http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/digital/?p=4873 Last week we had the pleasure of having Laurence, a year 10 student from a local Bath school, with us for a work experience placement. We really enjoyed having him here and giving him a taste of what we do. Here's what he said about his week.


I managed to arrange a work experience placement with the Digital Marketing and Communications team at the University of Bath. This is a brief account of what I got up to during my week.

Day 1 - my introduction to the workplace

So, it was the first day, SCARY. When I entered the office though, I felt welcomed there by lots of smiley faces.

We started the day with a stand up meeting. It happens every morning and it involves the whole office standing in a circle and saying the most important thing they did yesterday and the most important thing they would do today. The most important thing for me was learning everybody’s names!

Later that day, I joined Dan and Tegan in the design hub. I worked with Tom, an A level student, who was doing work experience in the office next door. We started the afternoon by drawing our version of the University logo. My design was... well… let’s just say they won’t be replacing the logo too soon.

After that, we were asked to look at other university home pages. We noted down parts of the pages that we liked and parts that we didn’t like so much. We were then told to compare two different pages but wrote it on a glass wall, which was strangely satisfying. Something different from school.

Sketched ideas for the University of Bath website homepage

Day 2 - my first solo assignment

It felt easier coming in on day 2 because I knew what to expect. This time, I actually joined in with stand up and told everyone what I was going to be doing that day; a benchmarking exercise.

I spent the day comparing competitor university sites to the University website. This involved creating a spreadsheet and noting any differences or similarities. I came to the conclusion that they were all fairly similar. Except, of course, Bath’s new website - by far the best.

I got a better understanding of what it is like to be a part of the team and how they work.

Day 3 - getting to know the team better

This was the day that I got to spend some time with the team and ask them directly about their jobs. In the morning, I spoke to Sean, who works on support. He showed me how he replied to emails from the internal customers (University staff). After this, he showed me Ruby, which is a programing language used by the developers here to build applications. I thought it was interesting because I didn’t know much about it and it was interesting to see what he could do with it.

In the afternoon, I sat with the Content team and spoke to the editors and content producers to find out what they do in their jobs. I found what Rod did very interesting as he was making a video to promote research. He showed me how he added layers in. I liked it because he is very creative.

I also found out that everybody in the office has a different work background from before they worked in this digital team. This is an example of how everyone works in a variety of different ways to perform the same job. Some people were recruitment consultants, English teachers and even involved in music.

Day 4 - further adventures in benchmarking

More benchmarking! This time I compared Bath's print prospectus with prospectuses from other universities. They varied in size and quality but the information was very similar (except some universities which offer different courses and had nicer covers!).

Day 5 - the last day

So it was my last day. After the usual round of stand up, we started the morning with Show and Tell. When I heard about it, I thought people would bring stuff in to talk about but instead I got to see five five-minute presentations about work they’d been doing recently. The presentations varied from a talk about the new course page design to the best bits from a visit to a conference to how to manage passwords.

In the afternoon, I’ve been writing this blog post and I’ve spoken to Rich, the Head of Digital.

I enjoyed my week of work experience and even earned a badge!

A 'badge' drawn on a Post-it note saying, 'I (work) experienced the DMC and lived!'

 

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