Update on the way forward

So far the overwhelming support (5 out of 6 responders) has been for option one – using a quality slider.

One respondent (Ben) came up with a wonderful idea that ties in very well with a historical feature of TRIP – colour coding. Around 5-7 years ago, when TRIP introduced results categorisation (‘evidence based’, ‘primary research’ ‘Q&A’ etc) we gave each category a colour. However, over time things got complicated and we decided to drop the colour coding.

Ben suggested we try giving the ‘quality slider’ a visual colour change. I’m guessing this could be multiple colours or different shades of the same colour. In the latter case it could be something like the darker the colour the higher the quality. How this might manifest itself in the results page I’m not sure, some immediate thoughts (so not necessarily well though out):

• Each result has a coloured box or bar representing the likely quality.
• The results themselves are written in a particular shade.
• Each result has the underlined hyperlink given the particular colour.

Something for the design guys to get their heads round – assuming we go with the quality slider!

The new TRIP

Around 11.30 today the new version of TRIP went live. But what's so different? Lots of new features most designed to help users locate the information they need quickly; these include:

• Snippets. These are the 2-3 lines of summary text from the returned document. These have been demonstrated to significantly improve the recall of appropriate search results.
• Conclusions. Where documents have conclusions we have designed our system to 'grab them' and allow them to be displayed within TRIP. This has numerous advantages including a significant reduction in bandwidth, very useful if you don't have the 'luxury' of broadband access.
• Advanced search. This has been redesigned to allow a significant improvement in usability in this function.
• Comments. We love the BMJ's 'rapid responses' so why not allow TRIP users to share their views with the wider TRIP community?
• RSS feeds. This feature allows you to 'save' a search as an RSS feed. If new material is added that appears in the top 50 search results for the same search, its outputted via RSS.
• Memory. We've doubled the capacity of our servers memory, this should bring about a rapid increase in speed.
• Redesign. A mixed blessing this one! Basically, we need to increase our income vai Google ads. As it stands not enough people are clicking on the ads so our income from these is not sufficient to pay for costs and fuel our significant development plans. By making the ads more prominent, the theory is, that more people will click on them....

I'm pretty chuffed, I hope you are too!