Digital and Creative Media

Sometimes (but not often) people ask me: What’s the difference between a digital team and a communications or marketing team?

(Sometimes people also confuse digital teams with IT, but let’s not open that box right now…)

It’s true that both digital teams and comms or marketing teams create content or produce information – in some cases out of very little raw material.

But where a digital team differs is in its bird’s-eye view of the wider digital estate of an organisation – both owned (website) and “rented” (social media, other portals, etc).

In taking this view, it notices something profound about humans: we tend to favour action over inaction.

Introducing action bias

Action bias, as it’s called by some academics and experts, is a psychological instinct to “do something” rather than “do nothing”. It’s natural and it happens all the time in most walks of life – even when there’s no evidence to suggest that action is the best course to take.

Action bias pervades decision-making in many organisations. It favours the creation of new information, deluging our audiences and drowning out the important stuff that users need to see, read or do in their lives.

In the world of communications and marketing, it is the essence of the profession. But for digital content teams, this bias towards action can be debilitating. It means the constant creation of more noise, marketing messages, news, guides, explainers, FAQs, policies and other “resources”. 

For any big website, such as those run by universities or public authorities, prioritising creation over maintenance or deletion only leads to one outcome: a terrible user experience. 

How to stop action bias

How do you stop people having action bias?

That’s such a great question and thank you for asking.

I’ve been asking myself the same questions over the past few years: How can we, as a team, avoid this from happening? How can we persuade others in our organisation to interogate the problems before jumping to the creative stage?

Let’s talk about it – looking ahead to ContentEd

It was playing on my mind so much that I pitched a talk about it to ContentEd, a conference for content professionals in the education sector.

It must’ve touched a nerve because they offered me a slot at ContentEd 2024 in Liverpool this October.

My talk is for you if you’ve ever despaired of the ideas of others or the volume of information on the internet – whether you’re a creator, commissioner or manager of content, or a leader of people.

There’ll be loads of other great speakers as well.

See you there?

• View the Sussex web profile of Adrian Imms
• View Adrian Imms on LinkedIn

A key part of managing content and getting people to find it is understanding your audience. This is the basis of our approach to content creation within Digital and Creative Media.

But not everyone in a large organisation thinks about users; often they have competing priorities internally that make it hard to do this.

As part of the New Web Estate project, we’re keen to make sure that any future way of working considers our audiences from the start.

Insights to inform strategy

We’ve been working with a content strategy consultancy to gather and generate audience insights.

These insights will inform our digital content strategy but also help to steer how people at Sussex think about users by giving them an audience insights database to use.

The database will support people who write content at short notice with tight deadlines to access recent research and write user-centred copy.

The six key audience groups we’ve focused on for this are:

• alumni
• civic community
• current students
• prospective students
• staff
• researchers.

Gathering existing insights

For the first phase, we’ve collected insights from across the university and analysed these with the agency to identify gaps in our knowledge using a four-layer model:

• access layer – the channels and platforms people use
• information layer – what our audiences want and need from us
• emotion layer – understanding what motivates users
• influence – what influences and distracts them.

We discovered that while we have good knowledge about the information that audiences need and the channels they use, we often lack understanding of user motivations and emotions.

Generating fresh insight

To fill these gaps, the agency conducted stakeholder interviews, surveys, user interviews and focus groups with each audience. These were added to our existing insights and uploaded to the new insights database.

The idea is that fresh insight can be added to the database over time and build on the audience knowledge we have.

Next

The next step is to finish a working prototype of the actual front-end of the insights database (powered by a large language model similar to ChatGPT), which can examine the questions we ask it and give us detailed answers based on the data it has.

This saves content editors from having to trawl through cloud storage folders looking for what they need, and we can continue to add to the base of information to build out the insights that the model can work from.

Sharing insights within the University

If you have audience insights (surveys, polls, focus group outputs and so on) that you’d like to add to the database, email dcm@sussex.ac.uk.

In May, we ran a Learning at Work Week event at Sussex to talk about the importance of digital accessibility.

Amie Morrell, who’s currently QA and Accessibility Manager within Digital and Creative Media, led the session, pulling together the accessibility guidance we give to Sussex staff and adding context to changes in accessibility rules.

During our session, we covered: 

• what digital accessibility is 
• why it’s important 
• how to create content that meets accessibility standards.

What is digital accessibility?

If you’re not sure what we mean by digital accessibility, it’s designing web pages, apps and other technologies so that they’re usable by everyone, including people with disabilities. This involves removing barriers so all users can perceive, understand, navigate and interact with digital content.

To create this inclusive space, we must follow laws and standards such as WCAG 2.2, the Equality and Disability Act, and the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations.

In the session, we also discussed the upcoming European Accessibility Act (coming in June 2025), which has more enforcement powers.

What we explored 

In the session we covered some of the assistive technologies people might use to access our content including screen readers, sip and puff devices and keyboard only. We showed videos of people using some of these technologies and explained why it’s important to create accessible content.

Interestingly, many assistive technologies are now widely used. For example, Ofcom found that 80% of people use TV subtitles to enhance their viewing experience, especially in quiet environments where they can’t use sound. 

We then looked at the things we can do collectively when creating content to ensure everyone can access our information.

This includes: 

• well-written page titles and hierarchical headers 
• descriptive link text 
• alt text for images 
• transcripts and subtitles for videos and podcasts 
• clear, simple language
• a colour contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for text over background colour.

More about Learning at Work Week

Learning at Work Week (LAW Week) is a national event led by Campaign for Learning to foster a culture of continuous learning and development in the workplace.

Using LAW Week was a fantastic opportunity to highlight digital inclusivity, especially as we progress the New Web Estate project. It was great to see such a strong turnout and clearly there is an appetite among the Sussex community to deliver a more inclusive experience. We’re excited to have them supporting us as we work towards a new website.

Next

Our mission is to create an accessible website experience for all users. We aim to educate our University community about the necessity of producing fully-compliant content, systems and apps – not only to meet legal requirements but also to put our users at the heart of everything we do.

The session was a wonderful opportunity to spread the word about this vitally important and often overlooked area and we’d love to do more.

If you work at Sussex, or you’re working with us, and want to learn more about digital accessibility or need advice about making something accessible, email dcm@sussex.ac.uk.  

It’s been a while since we last posted on this blog. (Just shows the work involved in content creation, I guess…)

Since our last post, the project previously mentioned has been given a snappy name: the New Web Estate project. It broadly has the scope of covering our website, a staff intranet and the supporting systems and processes needed to make this work.

We spent the rest of 2023 pulling together a project mandate, which enabled us to take on a couple of new, fixed-term people in the digital team to help us keep going with business-as-usual while sizing up the task at hand.

After getting sign-off on the mandate, we’ve spent 2024 so far building a business case.

This has involved several strands of work, including:

• gathering audience insights
• developing a new approach to managing content
• engaging senior people from across the university in our work
• understanding how a new CMS would support a connected content model.

We’ll cover all these individually in future posts.

We’re shortly to look at a provisional new structure for the website – known as information architecture – and explore the beginnings of a content strategy.

To help us, we’ve brought an agency on board for this phase – more to follow on that in another post.

All of this will help us to build a business case that will go to the leadership of the university later this year.

After that, all being well, the real building will begin.

We’re reviving the DCM blog – and for good reason.

There’s a new project on the horizon at Sussex, which we hope will transform our digital estate – taking in our website, news systems, a possible intranet and databases that power what people see when they interact with the University online.

The aim is to provide a joined-up user experience, devoid from the internal structures of the organisation.

We’ve tried this a few times before; over the past 15 years there’ve been three serious attempts to modernise the Sussex website but each one stalled for a variety of reasons.

I started at Sussex in early 2017, even then, people knew change was needed. But the drivers for change were not there. The organisation knew what it was about (interdisciplinarity, etc) and it had a well-established, segmented culture, but it was nowhere near mature enough for such a technological shift. Plus we were top-20, so everything was fine.

When I became head of digital content 18 month ago, the world was already a different place. I and others started making some noise about how our website is the foundation upon which our business exists. A few months later, we were fortunate enough to be blessed with a new associate director, Rachel Levett, who understands that the world wide web, and our visibility within it, is kind of a big deal.

Since then, we’ve been speaking to a lot of people across the university and we truly feel that most of our community appreciate the need for change.

Only today, Rachel presented the plan for a new web estate to other people in our professional services division. Many were excited by what the project can deliver.

People understand the need for one unified website, managed by specialists, that competes with our strident competitors rather than leaving us in their dust.

How we get there, in this brave new world, is another matter.