Rachael Rainbow and I had a fascinating day out at the Digital Communications for Charities conference back in January, where I gave a talk on ‘Effective fundraising through better user experience’. The focus of the conference was online fundraising for charities and it was really refreshing for us to get the client-side perspective on this.

There were some excellent talks throughout the conference.

During a recent usability study, I wanted to share some thoughts with our client about how to encourage people to engage with their site a little more deeply, as this is currently a key objective for them.

I got the opportunity to speak at an event held by the Usability Professionals Association and LBi a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel on ‘openness of information and communities in Healthcare.’ Also there, were members of the NHS Connecting for Health team, who are developing some amazing interfaces and hardware, including this rather nice tablet.

The tablet has quite an interesting story behind it. Designed to be used by health care workers in hospitals, it has to meet an amazing list of requirements. The initial spec. was drawn up by the Connecting for Health team, and taken round a variety of manufacturers, they said they wanted something that was wipe clean, could be dropped without damage, had a five hour battery life, could be immersed in alcohol for sterilizing, had wifi, secure bluetooth, biometric security, barcode scanner, rf-id scanner, camera and just about everything else, for under £1000. Amazingly they now have the machine.

I spoke briefly on how we need to look beyond simply delivering health information, and understand the barriers to behavioural change that stop people getting the health outcomes they want. I was very pleased when, later in the day, the results of the user research project for the NHS Choices site was presented by another team. These findings broadly vindicated my position, and the fact that we are getting the same findings, on a research project that is a fraction of the size, really supports our approach.

For those interested, click the link for an outline of my talk: