02 December 2024 - Eighty UX HE professionals sharing, collaborating and ideating: The magic of UCISA UX24
The first UCISA UX in Higher Education conference happened in September 2024. Reflecting on the day, there was much to take in and share, both as a UX practitioner and as lead of the team planning the conference.
On Tuesday 17 September 2024, 80 people from Higher Education institutions from across the country came together for the first UCISA UX24, a conference aimed specifically at people working in UX in Higher Education. This in-person, one-day conference had been my idea over a year ago and over the months leading up to the event I had chaired the organising committee to complete all the necessary planning to make the conference happen.
Balancing the numbers, the event was a success – it attracted sponsors and we sold out all available tickets (and even had to operate a waiting list). Several months after the event, I have had time to reminisce on my personal experience of the day, and have had the chance to review the feedback received from attendees with the rest of the UCISA UX Group committee. In this blog post, I share my highlights from the day, note lessons learned and think about actions for what’s next.
My highlights from UX24
Too many to mention, but below I have described a selection of my stand-out moments from the day.
The power of bringing the community together in-person
Before this conference, the UCISA UX Group events were all virtual. Many of our webinars have attracted over one hundred people, with conversations flowing through the Teams chat. An in-person event with 80 UXers together had a different kind of energy, however. Every time I surveyed the room I could see conversations happening with people explaining their circumstances and others actively listening. I had a real sense of a community of practice as Wenger defined:
“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this areas by interacting on an ongoing basis” Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, 1999”
I was excited to think of the conference seeding interactions and forging collaborations which would continue long past the day itself.
Setting the right note by opening the conference
I have had the privilege of speaking at various conferences and gatherings, but opening a conference was an honourable first for me. I found it difficult to prepare a slide deck to sum up all my aspirations and expectations for the day in a succinct way, being mindful not to cover any of the topics I knew would be included in both the keynote and the subsequent speaker talks. After much thought, I decided on using the time to elaborate on the conference theme ‘Challenges and Opportunities’. I prepared a few slides to acknowledge common challenges and flipped the narrative to note how we, the UX community, could collectively address these by applying our fine-tuned problem-framing abilities. Referring to a UX idiom ‘to sprinkle UX dust’ (often used to refer to UX being brought in too late in a production process) I urged attendees to adopt a new perspective on the concept of UX dust, framing it as a metaphor for creative sparks of energy to help and support us in our ongoing response to our shared challenges.
Me opening the UX24 conference
Tash Willcocks and Ben Holliday – inspiring and encouraging in their keynote
The day of the conference brought many memorable moments, but meeting Tash Willcocks and Ben Holliday in person was a particular personal highlight. I have been inspired by their work for years and having them both as keynote speakers was better than I could have imagined. Ben began by affirming the power of systems leadership toward achieving user-centred goals in Higher Education and presented principles as a means to lead in this way. Pleasingly for a book-addict like myself he included several book recommendations for my growing list (‘Digital Darwinism by Tom Goodwin, and ‘From what is to what if’ by Rob Hopkins) and even referenced a childhood favourite ‘The Twits’ by Roald Dahl to illustrate one of the principles.
With the inspirational scene set, Tash took over, sharing an eye-catching visual she had created for UX in Education and getting attendees talking by asking them to reflect on what the principles meant for their personal practice of UX, and challenging them to think about how they could use this knowledge to rewrite or change stories in their own organisations. After the keynote there was a tangible buzz in the room which continued throughout the event, and it was a joy to have Ben and Tash available for the rest of the day, engaging with attendees and generously sharing their wisdom and experience.
Trying out new techniques with support in workshops
Members of our UCISA UX community have frequently made requests for hands-on opportunities to practice UX techniques and approaches, to enable them to try things out for themselves. I was excited that we were able to offer attendees a choice of two workshops, one ran by Ned Potter from the University of York (‘Communicating the benefits of UX to everyone who needs to hear it’) and one from Catherine Broadley and Prakash Chauhan from Manchester Metropolitan University (‘Drawing insights: unveiling user behaviours through cognitive mapping in UX).
I attended Catherine and Prakash’s session, and welcomed the opportunity to spend 10 minutes drawing out a ‘a day in the life of my work persona’, including the tasks, interactions, tools and obstacles I encounter in my role as UX Manager. When we were encouraged to explain our drawings to others and think about the negative and positive aspects, it helped me realise the importance of treating all customers of the UX Service in a welcoming manner, without assuming or expecting them to have any prior knowledge of what UX is and how it works, to avoid the risk of them feeling that UX could not benefit them in some way. My main takeaway from the session was to challenge myself to start talking about UX and what it does in new and different ways, without relying on the specialist language I am familiar with as a UX practitioner.
Data as a Service for longer-term streamlined decision-making
In my experience, applying UX methods consistently within long-term ongoing projects requires a lot of looking backwards to go forwards. In other words, there is a need to constantly revisit data gathered and refer to the reasoning behind previous decisions to keep projects on a track towards user experience improvements and guard against scope creep or tangential objectives.
Stephanie Carlson, Data Scientist at the University of Cambridge presented a session acknowledging the value and potential of centralised data for streamlined decision making, optimised student services and continuous improvement. Acknowledging some of the drawbacks of current ways of using data (including: manual data-handling processes, multiple data formats, data stored in fragmented systems, inconsistent use of terminology), she proposed a Data as a Service (DaaS) model and explained how this could work applied at the curriculum level, as a way to join up the actions relating to academic departments, finance, admissions, space planning and virtual learning environments. I have previously investigated the use of repositories and insights banks as a way to store research data but the idea of DaaS was a new one for me and I made a pledge to learn more about how this could work and the specialist data skills and experience required to support it.
UX applied to digital assessment at the University of Cambridge
In July 2024, the UX Service began to support a major University project (LOUISA) aimed at improving the student and staff experience of assessment and feedback through Learn (our virtual learning environment).
A few months into the LOUISA project I was interested to attend a session by Sylwia Dzula (Senior User Researcher) and David Marshall (User Research & Data Science Team Lead) from the University of Cambridge sharing how they had applied UX methods to ensure user research data guided the procurement of a digital assessment solution.
Although the scope of their work was different to LOUISA (it focused on a digital solution for in-person typed exams rather than improving the user experience associated with in-course assessments), there were several points that resonated with our LOUISA work so far, for example, they had taken time to understand the current state by working with examiners and administrators to validate the assessment journeys (similar to a piece of business analysis work completed for LOUISA between 2022 and 2023). Despite having a more sizeable user research function than ourselves (Sylwia and David form part of a team of seven in a Product and Service Design Group) and having collected data from numerous departments, they acknowledged that UX was brought in to the process too late, and that further research was needed to help make decisions. Comparing this to our approach for LOUISA, I felt reassured that the UX Service has been involved from the start, and resolved to keep a strong focus on carrying out research and optimising use of our research data for project decisions.
How did we do? what we learned and how we’ll improve
The day flew by, and when attendees approached myself and the rest of the committee to express their thanks, we all felt very proud of what we had achieved. For the following days and weeks it was heartening so see a lot of positive social media coverage of the conference particularly on LinkedIn, with both attendees and non attendees expressing interest in and support for the conference.
Being practised UX professionals ourselves, however, we had set the bar high for the user experience we had wanted our conference to provide to attendees, and therefore each had our own set of observations and notes about areas for improvement. When the conference was over, we set a date for a retrospective with the wider committee to bring together our own thoughts, as well as the detailed feedback collected from attendees through a survey circulated by UCISA after the event. From this session, we were very proud to see very positive feedback about the event, nice comments about the sessions, resolutions to apply ideas learned, suggestions for topics at future events, and an overall very strong sense of satisfaction with and support for the event.
"Really well organised event. Excellent food and venue. Good sponsors. Great presentations and a great chance to network with like-minded people” – one of a selection of positive comments submitted in feedback"
From analysis of the feedback, we also highlighted certain areas to address:
Strike a better balance between quantity versus duration of sessions
The day-long programme included eight plenary sessions, a choice of two breakout sessions and a choice of two workshops, which some attendees noted was a bit much for them. Some said they would have liked more time for conversations with other attendees, and some of the presenters said they would have liked longer than the allocated 25 minutes to deliver their talks. We acknowledged that, given this was our first conference and given the broad theme, we had erred on the side of including more sessions for a varied programme, but also recognised that by taking this approach, we had potentially tried to do too much in one day. We came up with some ideas to avoid this in future conferences: having fewer talks with longer breaks, or extending the conference offering to include an optional pre-event dinner for networking the night before.
If we have an event app, it needs to be relevant and useful for attendees
Before the day, all attendees had been invited to download an event app from an external provider which contained details of the sessions for the day. The feedback showed that most attendees had used the app but had been disappointed by it. Some felt they could have accessed the schedule more easily from the conference website and others said they would have found the app more useful if it had allowed them to connect with other attendees through use of the QR codes on their event lanyards.
High demand for a conference next year but we need to keep it affordable
The feedback forms provided a very rich source of data and ideas for topics the UX community would like to be addressed by our UX Group next year, and it was natural for the organising committee (and myself in particular) to feel excited about the prospect of growing the conference next year. Before getting carried away, however, it was important to note that many of the responses to a feedback question about barriers to attending future events related to cost. 2024 has been a challenging year for the Higher Education sector and until financial pressures have eased, we need to ensure any future offering does not prove exclusionary and offers excellent value for money.
Will there be a UX25 next year?
As a committee, we were collectively in favour of running another conference in 2025, and have have submitted our budget plans to UCISA accordingly (putting forward the positive feedback, testimonials and social media engagement in support). We are confident and hopeful that another UX in Higher Education will be a welcome fixture in the UCISA calendar of events not only for people already working in UX, but also, acknowledging the universal applicability of UX across other disciplines, for those curious to know more about what UX is, how it works and the benefits it can bring.
Written by Emma Horrell
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