John, our Senior Digital Product Manager, looks at our approaches to decision making and discusses how a relentless focus on data alone can be an issue for our team.
It’s vital to ensure your digital products are data-driven, right? Countless blog posts champion and showcase how to utilise data in a better way. But how do you manage this with limited resources?
Continue reading: Is data the only way to identify priorities in improving our digital services?
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
A guest post by Neil Gunn, Digital Delivery and Performance Consultant.
I’ve had the distinct pleasure of working with the University’s in-house Digital Experience team since November 2022, to support them in a consultancy capacity to optimise their internal process and workflows, and make the most out of their limited resource.
On my last day with the team, I’ve paused to reflect on what I’ve learned about them and myself.
Applications for this post have now closed.
We’re looking for an agency or freelance contractor to help us design user-centred products and services at the University.
Applications for this post have now closed.
We’re looking for an agency or freelance contractor to help us jump start an exciting change to the way we deliver digital products and services at the University.
Continue reading: We’re hiring! Digital Delivery And Performance consultant
I’m really pleased to be sharing our Digital Comms roadmap for the next quarter. It’s the first time we’ve publicly shared it. It’s our way of explaining what we’ve done, what we’re doing and what we think we’re going be doing next.
Continue reading: Our new roadmap
Digital officers Katie Manktelow and Hazel Jackson have pair written their top tips for pair writing.
As the saying goes, two heads are better than one. Pair writing is two (or more) people writing together. Introduced by agile software developers who were writing code, it’s now common practice in content design teams including our own. We use this approach to write copy for the website.
Continue reading: Pair writing: Why we love it
6,000 members of staff and almost 28,000 students, six faculties, 28 schools and departments, 12 institutes, over 250 research groups, groups clusters and networks, and 14 divisions… The University of Bristol is, if nothing else, a complex institution.
Continue reading: Putting people at the centre of our research comms
I published a post last summer about the positive effect a new project management framework was having for us and those we work with. A lot has happened since then, but, through it all, DPAB has doggedly and determinedly continued to meet every Wednesday to triage, assess and prioritise. We couldn’t do without it. So, what is DPAB and why do you need one?
Continue reading: Why every digital team needs a ‘DPAB’
