Surepoint blog » user experience

Experimentations with Lightbox 2

Rowan Purdy — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 22:11:25 +0000

The brilliant Lightbox 2 javascript/css, written by Lokesh Dhakar, allows you to present images in a slick window, while darkening the rest of the page. It adds a whole lot of design panache to a website, and adds very little to page load times. It does not require any browser plugins to work. It uses javascript and when a browser doesn’t support javascript, the code fails gracefully.

I have recently been experimenting with a WordPress plugin developed by Rupert Morris that makes the implementation of Lightbox 2 a snap.

Click on the images below to see Lightbox 2 in action. Hats off to Lokesh and Rupert. All images courtesy of www.flickr.com in accordance with the Creative Commons attribution license. Attributions in alt tags of images and full attributions at foot of this page.

Attributions

Red Bricks by DonnaGrayson http://flickr.com/photos/donnagrayson/92843510/
Pink &Yellow Wall by DonnaGrayson http://flickr.com/photos/donnagrayson/92843509/
deep blue sea (wall) by christing-O- http://flickr.com/photos/christing/1447039348/
Orange texture by geishaboy500 http://flickr.com/photos/geishaboy500/2370469559/
layer_texture_011 by cwbuecheler http://flickr.com/photos/cuse/1152651136/
Stair by Neil 101 http://flickr.com/photos/neilw/204239787/
Wood Blue Texture by cirox http://flickr.com/photos/cirox/2392965854/
teXture 004 – Rusty Metal by Just.N8 http://flickr.com/photos/themacguy2k/3280287142/

Improving information and choice about psychiatric medication

Rowan Purdy — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 21:25:23 +0000

We are supporting a multi-sector partnership project to develop a website www.choiceandmedication.com that offers people information about medications used in the mental health setting to help people make informed decisions about medication.

Background to the work

A previous research project led by the National Institute for Mental Health in England identified the most common questions that professionals and people who use services have about precribed psychiatric medication.

The idea behind the website was to provide an engaging way for people to interact with these questions. These are intended as a starting point to inform discussions and choices about medication.

The site makes a genuine attempt to inform, educate and support. The information it provides is based on published data from well recognised information sources such as national professional bodies.

The website is the result of a multi-sector partnership project involving Norfolk and Waveney Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, the United Kingdom Psychiatric Pharmacy Group (UKPPG), the National Institute for Mental Health in England (NIMHE) and the Pharmaceutical Schizophrenia Initiative, an Association of British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI) affiliated group. We have also consulted with many bodies … read more.

User informed design

We worked with web developers Ichameleon to develop the site. We have encouraged the adoption of a prototyping approach within the project to support better user informed design. The website has been made available for people to engage with it and test early on it’s development cycle.

To support this approach we have developed a range of mechanisms to foster and gather user feedback to inform future development. This includes using open source wiki (Tiki-wiki) and survey (Limesurvey) platforms as well as taking advantage of Google applications and analytics tools.

By working in this way we are:

making best use of freely available technologies to reduce costs
supporting community engagement with the product early on in its lifecycle
generating enthusiasm and excitement about the products future protential
actively listening to what users say they want
gathering detailed intelligence on visitor usage, and
promoting increased confidence amongst project partners and sponsors.

Patient Opinion mashes up public feedback from different sources

Rowan Purdy — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 09:27:36 +0000

In an exciting new venture those in the Patient Opinion lab have “mashed up” the public feedback which government publishes on NHS Choices website, with public feedback submitted through their own Patient Opinion site.

Patient Opinion is a not-for-profit social enterprise web site which encourages patients to share their experience of their treatment in the NHS.

According to James Munro of Patient Opinion, the resulting melange aims “To make it easier both for patients and staff to access all the feedback about their local services, and to increase the chance that public feedback will generate real improvements in services“

This work from the Patient Opinion lab follows the work of the Cabinet Office led Power of Information (POI) taskforce which is opening up more public sector information as part of its implementation of the Power of Information Review. Read more about this on the POI blog.

Here at Surepoint we are doffing our caps to the Patient Opinion team and are looking to follow in their innovative footsteps.

Watch this space for news on work underway to bring in data about local mental health services from the NHS Choices website into the Choice and medication website we have developed. Our aim is to ensure that when people using mental health services and their carers have found information about prescribed psychiatric medication on the Choice and medication website they can also find out information about local mental health services without having to look somewhere else.

Where does innovation really come from?

Rowan Purdy — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 20:38:10 +0000

In his stimulating recent blog “Social Innovation: how do we find the right problems?“ Lee Bryant, Headshift co-founder, reflects on the wealth of agency led initiatives dedicated to the supply of innovation and asks “where does innovation really come from”, and whether there is “a direct link between these initiatives and actual innovation?”.

Lee asks “Are we in danger of focusing too much on the supply side and not enough on the real world problems that demand innovative solutions?”. Lee summarises some of the most visible parts of the innovation initiative iceberg and justifiably leads us towards an affirmative response to this question. Rightly so given the size of that iceberg!

Lee says “I would put my money on somebody with a burning problem and a passion to solve it rather than a well-meaning group who want to help every single time. Me too. I think it is the burning and the passion that matter most. Innovation comes from motivation. I call this motinnovation.

Given this hypothesis, the most interesting question that Lee poses is “How might we harness user-led innovation?”. In fact, Lee undersells just how much he and his colleagues at Headshift have done in developing easy to use environments that enable people to connect with each other to share and learn about what works and also what doesn’t.

Having said I think that innovation comes from motivation the question I want to explore is, “What are the optimum environmental conditions for maximum motinnovation amongst groups?”

There’s a whole host of cultural, legal, managerial and technical issues which can affect these environmental conditions. More than I have time or space for here! Of all the techniques which can be used to facilitate motinnovation amongst groups by far the most important is building trust.

Without trust people are unwilling to participate and cooperate with one another and innovation suffers. However, building trust is not a linear progression to a magic place. Building trust is cyclical and involves iterative development. Providing opportunities for people to take small steps together is a great start. The barcamp-style gatherings that Lee mentions sound just about right. Fertile breeding grounds for mixing collective passions. In my opinion it is the collective experience of taking small steps together which forms the motivational basis for more ambitious collaboration and ultimately innovation. Some have responded saying, “You should get down to the bar more often!”

Google Librarian

Rowan Purdy — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 21:04:10 +0000

Google Librarian was created to help librarians and information professionals master the art of online searching and harness the infinite power of Google and its services.

Google Librarian provides tips, tricks, strategies, lesson plans, tutorials, and easy to understand explanations to improve your Google experience. There is also a monthly newsletter which tries to answer some of the most frequently asked questions posed by librarians e.g. How does Google index the web, and, more importantly, how does it rank the results of the searches we regularly perform? >> Listen to this blog posting as an MP3 audio file

Ajax promises improved user experience of the web

Rowan Purdy — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 21:10:39 +0000

Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym Ajax, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. In this post I describe the benefits to end users, introduce some examples of Ajax use on the web and have a look behind the scenes to explain how the magic works.

Benefits to end users

The key benefit of Ajax for end users is they are likey to experience an increase in the web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability. Put simply, Ajax achieves this by shifting a great deal of interaction to the end users computer, exchanging data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change.

This has great potential for community sites like the knowledge community, where changing information is often surrounded by feature panels and navigation elements.

Examples of Ajax use on the web

Jesse Garrett says,

‘Take a look at Google Suggest. Watch the way the suggested terms update as you type, almost instantly. Now look at Google Maps.
Zoom in. Use your cursor to grab the map and scroll around a bit.
Again, everything happens almost instantly, with no waiting for pages
to reload… [These] are two examples of a new approach to
web applications … [known as] Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.’

How the magic works

According to Wikipedia, Ajax is not a technology in itself, but a term that refers to the use of a group of technologies together. The Ajax technique uses a combination of:

XHTML (or HTML) and CSS for marking up and styling information.
The DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, especially ECMAScript implementations like JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented
The XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in some situations, an IFrame object is used instead of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with the web server.
XML is commonly used as the format for transfering data, although any format will work, including preformatted HTML, plain text, JSON and even EBML.

Jesse Garrett, uses the diagram below to highlight the difference between the classic web application model and the Ajax model. The key to all this is user experience. Ajax cuts down on the waiting times creating a much more positive experience for end users.

Figure 1: The traditional model for web applications (left) compared to the Ajax model (right).

Connecting magic models

On a theoretical level there’s a lot in common with this approach to web development and organisational development using the Lean thinking methodology. Lean thinking is a method to help an organisation, group or project

team to improve the productivity, efficiency and quality of its
products or services. The founding principle is that no work should be
done unless it is going to create a better experience for customers. By clearly defining
value for a specific product or service from the end customer’s
perspective, all the non value activities, or waste, can be identified
and removed step by step. The Ajax technique allows the non value activities to occur ‘behind the scenes’ creating space for all the value activities in the ’shop window’.

Patient opinion

Rowan Purdy — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 19:35:26 +0000

Patient Opinion is all about enabling patients to share their experiences of health care, and by doing so help other patients — and perhaps even change the NHS.

As well as allowing everyone to see what patients are saying about their services, it also offers a way to feed the experience of patients back to the NHS so that their insights and ideas can be put to good use.

Visit the site at www.patientopinion.org

Knowledge Community scoops international award

Rowan Purdy — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 19:40:15 +0000

The Knowledge Community website was winner of the Innovation in Knowledge Management category at the 2005 International Information Industry Awards.

The Care Services Improvement Partnership developed the Knowledge Community in partnership with key stakeholders and social software developers Headshift.

The shortlisted entries for the Innovation in Knowledge Management category were:

BT legal knowledge zone
Cabinet Office and HM Revenue and Customs, Public Sector Benchmarking Service
National Institute for Mental Health in England knowledge community
Norwich Union Life/Autonomy

Where now for the KC?

Rowan Purdy, national strategic knowledge management lead and senior client manager, says,

‘We have all worked extremely hard over the last few years to deliver the knowledge community. I am extremely proud that our work with our partners has been recognised by such a prestigious award.

We are now entering a really exciting phase of development. for the knowledge community. We want to create a friendly environment which is simple, social and easy to use for everyone. Our commitment to user centred design will be critical in helping to achieve this.

We do not underestimate the challenges that lie ahead. We’ll try and embrace them with the same spirit that has helped to deliver our success to date: that of partnership and the importance of putting people first. If we are mindful that everyone has something to share and everyone has something to learn we can shape the tools to meet our needs. This will enable us to share what works well across the care services.’

Ingrid Steele, director of knowledge and communications services, says,

‘Our priority now is to improve the front end presentation of the community and develop it into a worthwhile resource for the care services.’