Scaling UX in a Decentralized World: Inside Oxford

In this episode, we chat with Sarah Zama from the University of Oxford about how she's helping to influence UX across one of the most complex and decentralized organizations in the world.

We explore how she built a UX center of excellence almost from scratch, how the team is transforming culture through coaching and community, and what it takes to push UX forward in a challenging environment. There's also a digression into Apple's questionable design choices, a fantastic app recommendation, and of course, Marcus' joke.

App Of The Week

This week’s app recommendation is Zuko Form Analytics. It’s an incredibly helpful tool for anyone involved in conversion rate optimization or form design.

Zuko tracks detailed interactions with every field in a form—like how long someone spends in a field, where they drop off, and what fields trigger abandonment.

You get session-level insights, and it all works via a simple JavaScript snippet. There's a free tier to get started (up to 1,000 sessions), and pricing starts around £40/month for 5,000 tracked sessions. It’s the kind of tool we wish we’d known about sooner.

Topic Of The Week: Building UX Capability at Oxford University

We were thrilled to be joined by Sarah Zama, UX Lead at the University of Oxford, to discuss a journey we’ve had the privilege of being part of: building a UX center of excellence in one of the most decentralized institutions in the world.

Getting Started With Limited Resources

Paul originally worked with a small team at Oxford to create the business case for a UX team, ultimately recommending a center of excellence model rather than a centralized tactical team.

Why? Because hiring enough UXers to match developer headcount across such a massive organization was never going to be viable. Instead, a small, strategic team could focus on enabling others.

Sarah took that vision and ran with it. She started with a written plan—not just a strategy that collects dust but a living, practical document with measurable outcomes. She quickly assembled a lean team, brought in an existing accessibility lead, and even secured a six-month secondee to help with projects and spread good UX practice further into the organization.

A Consultative, Empowering Approach

The Oxford UX team doesn’t do UX for people. Instead, they help others do UX better. Through consulting, coaching, training, and providing reusable assets (like a design system), the team makes itself useful across a broad landscape without getting dragged into execution.

This consultative model includes:

• Workshops to support high-profile projects
• Guest training sessions with external speakers
• Custom-built resources tailored to Oxford’s context
• Supportive relationships with departments already doing good UX

They’ve also cleverly leveraged accessibility requirements as a wedge to introduce better UX thinking, combining compliance with best practices to gain traction.

Growing a UX Culture

Perhaps most impressively, Sarah and her team have focused on growing a UX culture through grassroots advocacy. They’ve built a UX Champions network that now includes over 150 people from across the university. This community shares knowledge, resources, and a passion for improving user experience, even when UX isn’t in their job title.

It’s a smart way to scale. By empowering individuals and embedding UX thinking across departments, Sarah's team extends its reach far beyond what any centralized team could manage.

The Frustrations and the Wins

Sarah admits the biggest challenge is visibility. Getting buy-in across such a large institution takes time and constant communication. There’s also the frustration that people still perceive UX as a cost or blocker rather than an enabler of success.

But the wins are meaningful. A growing, skilled team. A network of passionate advocates. And projects where UX clearly moved the needle. Sarah credits much of the team’s progress to strong collaboration, openness to learning, and sheer persistence. It’s a long game, but one that’s already paying off.

You can follow Sarah’s team and explore their resources at staff.admin.ox.ac.uk/ux. They welcome feedback, iteration, and anyone who wants to borrow from their growing UX playbook.

Read Of The Week

This episode’s recommended read is The Leadership Dilemma, an article Paul wrote for Smashing Magazine. It reflects on the exact challenges Oxford faced: how do you scale UX influence when your team is too small to do all the work? The article walks through a strategic approach to UX leadership that empowers others, shifts the organizational mindset, and creates lasting change.

If you’re trying to build UX maturity in a large or slow-moving organization, this is worth your time.

Question Of The Week

This week’s question wasn’t submitted via email but came up naturally during the show: "What does a typical week look like for a small UX team in a large organization?"

Sarah’s answer? There’s no such thing as a typical week. Her team works on everything from:

• Running UX training
• Providing design and accessibility consultations
• Participating in project meetings
• Developing shared resources like design systems

They also embed temporarily into project teams to upskill staff, run workshops, and seed best practices. Some team members even take secondments into other departments to help spread UX thinking more deeply.

All of this reflects their consultative, empowering model. It’s not about building everything themselves but enabling others to build better.

Marcus' Joke

And finally, Marcus graced us with this gem:

"When I was young, I thought rich people owned Bose music systems and the rest of us had Sony products. Turns out they were just stereotypes."

We’ll let you groan in your own time.

Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back soon with another episode!

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