Visit the site An online community for professionals working together to improve health and care quality across the UK
Q is an initiative connecting people who have improvement expertise across the UK. It is led by the Health Foundation and supported and co-funded by NHS Improvement. The mission of Q is to foster continuous and sustainable improvement in health and care.
The Brief
We were approached by the Health Foundation to develop a website that would provide the community with a set of online tools to support the networking, information sharing and collaboration that was already happening offline. The Q community has emerged out of a principle of ‘co-design’, in which the members have been fundamental in shaping its activities, structure and form. They wanted this approach to extend into design and development of the website.
Our approach
With a tight deadline in place for the initial phase of work, some careful decisions were made in collaboration with client around scope, which balanced the desire to accommodate as many of the initial requirements identified by community members with the need to quickly establish a foundation that could evolve through future rounds.
Having rapidly produced wireframes, designs and a working prototype, we took the opportunity to run a workshop session at one of the large Q community learning events. Over the course of a day, we gathered feedback on designs and encouraged members to explore the prototype website and try out some typical tasks such as updating their profile or submitting information about a talk they could deliver. Through observation and conversation, we gathered users feedback and used it to optimise existing functionality and set priorities for future rounds of development.
The first iteration of the website is now live and we are carefully gathering analytics data to understand how members are using the website. Armed with this and our set of priorities for further development, we are about to embark on the next phase of development.
We couldn’t have chosen a better agency to work with on building the Q microsite. Simon felt like an extended member of our digital team and he, Adrian and Darren quickly got to grips with what Q is all about and what we needed the online experience to reflect. Super agile, they turned the site around in a really short space of time without compromising on functionality or design. We’re really pleased with the finished product and very proud to launch it to our Q members. An absolute dream to work with!
Lizzie Wrobel, Digital Communications Manager,
The Health Foundation
Highlights
At the core of the site is a directory of community members, searchable by location and areas of interest, making it easy for people to connect with other people near them or with a similar professional focus. Members are able to update their details using a front-end form on their profile pages, which saves them from having to navigate a potentially unfamiliar editing interface.
Logged-in members are able to add their own news stories and events so that content creation is devolved widely across the community. The Q administrators retain control of the core content and are able to provide publishing support and moderation where needed.
To encourage the dissemination of ideas, Q are developing a directory of ‘talks’ that members can offer to the community, which are listed on their profile page. If a person is interested in asking another to give a talk on a particular subject, each profile has a contact form that triggers an email to notify them.