Creating experiences – our UX service offering to you

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.

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What is a design system?

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.

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Understanding the inner workings: the Digital Experience team’s impact

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: 

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Boosting organic search traffic to the Dental School webpages

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.

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Week Notes: no data, no truth

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…

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Week Notes: looking backwards and looking forwards

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.

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Building campaign landing pages, part 2: a sprint to deliver

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.

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Building campaign landing pages, part 1: a reusable approach

In this first of two posts on campaign landing pages, Josh Morris (Senior Front End Developer) and Jamie Forsyth (UX/UI Designer) discuss streamlining the process of creating this type of content at the University.

In the past, the Digital Experience team has been very reactive. A stakeholder would give us a task like “I want a new website”, and we would go off and build it. Sounds OK on the face of it, right? However, this type of reactive approach is an inefficient way of working, and more often than not wastes time and resources.

Our team is trying to pivot to a more strategic approach – identifying and solving problems in a more centralised and reusable way.

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Keeping it real – optimising ‘social proof’ in postgraduate recruitment

A great indicator that you’ve designed a delightful user experience is having happy customers advocate for you, speaking positively about your products to family, friends, and – if you’re lucky enough to make an influencer happy – their online followers.

This is an example of ‘social proof’, and in this post our UX Designer Nabila Hisbaron talks us through our use of social proof to support postgraduate student recruitment.

In a recent user research sprint, we learned just how important social proofing can be for potential postgraduate applicants.

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Understanding digital in the context of a university

The term ‘digital’ is ubiquitous and has become a part of our everyday vocabulary – the digital revolution has impacted every aspect of our lives. And universities are no exception, digital transformation has brought significant change to the way we learn, teach, conduct research and work.

So, what does ‘digital’ mean in the context of a university? Rhiannon Davies, our Deputy Director of Digital Experience, shares her thoughts.

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