Digital prospectus business case
On Wednesday 16 September, the Digital Communications Portfolio Board approved a business case for redevelopment of the external University website. In essence, what we will be creating is a digital prospectus where…
Our design principles
Before designing a site you need a decision making framework. These are often called design principles. Here are the design principles we are using at St Andrews. Do you agree with them? Designing and building a…
Mobile first and responsive design
The core design mission of the new St Andrews website is to cater for mobile devices, as these are rapidly becoming the dominant medium for web. While most organisations still commission a website to look good on their…
The story so far and next actions
As digital becomes critical to the University of St Andrews, we are adapting the way we run our website. As many of you are new to our mailing list and blog, we thought now might be a good time to summarise what work…
Why is the user important?
As we may have mentioned a few times already, the digital communications team is committed to a user centred approach to our work: whether that be research, design, content or build. We have placed users at the heart…
A reminder of the downsides of FAQs
FAQs are the dinosaurs of web navigation Gerry McGovern outlines some of the key problems with FAQ sections on websites, including the following: If information is frequently asked for, you really ought to focus on it…
Continually improving our work habits with retrospectives
We've been running retrospectives at the end of each sprint for the last few months. This is how we do them and why they've been useful for improving how we work.
History of the homepage prototype project
The prototype homepage aimed at external audiences has been unveiled this week. It is the outcome of over a year of work. It has been an eventful year for the digital communications team. One year on from the launch of…
The benefits of user-centred design: Lessons learned from the Norwegian Cancer Society
The core model: Designing inside out for better results We have highlighted the story of the Norwegian Cancer Society before. After undergoing a big user-centred redesign, the organisation saw massive benefits for the…
Involving users in intranet design
User involvement for user adoption: an intranet strategy As we begin to investigate how an intranet here might work, this is a timely article from usability experts Nielsen Norman Group. Even when a new, usable design…