🛠️ The Oxford Blueprint: Balancing UX Consistency and Brand Differentiation across the University of Oxford’s Vast Digital Estate

Elizabeth McCarthy, Deputy Director, Head of Content and Digital Communications at the University of Oxford, and Daniel Wilson, Head of Design at Numiko, share the story behind Oxford's new website and the approach that is bringing UX consistency to over 800 sites across its digital estate. With the new Oxford website now live, Liz and Daniel reveal how they tackled one of the biggest challenges in higher education digital marketing: maintaining a coherent, trusted brand experience across hundreds of sites, each with different audiences and needs, without stifling the teams who manage them and their ability to express separate sub-brands. This is a session about brand at scale, and the practical decisions that make it work.

Key takeaways:

• Brand consistency drives user trust and performance. Even small visual or UX inconsistencies can make users question whether they're in the right place. Liz and Daniel show how a unified approach to design is improving the user experience across the University of Oxford’s digital estate, and why consistency should be a strategic priority for any institution managing multiple sites.
• You can protect the brand and empower your teams at the same time. This approach gives departments, museums and colleges the freedom to express their own sub-brands through customisable colours, typography and motion, while keeping the core user experience coherent. Senior marketers will learn how to strike the right balance between central control and local flexibility.
• Think in systems, not just websites. Rather than redesigning sites one at a time, Numiko created a reusable foundation for the University of Oxford that speeds up delivery, reduces duplication and makes every new site better from day one. This session covers how to make the case for this kind of strategic, long-term investment in your digital estate.