Benefits of user experience research and design

Employing user-centred practices brings tangible benefits to the University's digital services, bringing new focus and efficiency to projects.

Employing UX techniques to better understand your users' needs and deliver services that meet their expectations has benefits throughout the development cycle and on into service management.

Measuring the impact of change in user behaviour can lead to significant returns on investment.

Some key benefits we see in projects we have worked on:

Increased customer satisfaction by avoiding building things that audiences don't want.
Reduced user support overheads because products and processes are easier to use and optimised for self service.
Distributed time savings across the University as it becomes quicker to perform tasks.
Reduced development costs, getting more right first time through better communication and specification.
Greater assurance of legislative compliance such as accessibility and data privacy.

Read examples of these benefits in our case studies

Staff in the UX Service are currently working on two major projects:

Build of a new Web Publishing Platform, to replace EdWeb and provide a wider range of more flexible web products and solutions
Development of a new Design System for the University, to replace EdGEL with a more comprehensive set of components, principles and processes to define how the University designs content.

You can read more about these pieces of work in our blog posts:

In this period, we are offering a reduced service. We have a number of self-serve UX toolkits available, to help you plan and run activities to make your products and services more user-centric.. You can request access to these by emailing website.support@ed.ac.uk

This article was published on 2 Dec, 2022