Trip users are amazing – in less than 48 hours of releasing the survey we had 1,0001 responses, at which stage SurveyMonkey closed the survey saying we’d reached the limit!  Apologies if you feel your voice hasn’t been heard, if that is the case email me (jon.brassey@tripdatabase.com), I’d love to hear from you. Given your generosity of time I thought I’d share the initial results highlights…

The top 5 professions represented in the survey

  • Doctor – secondary or tertiary care
  • Doctor – primary care
  • Librarian
  • Other
  • Researcher/scientist

75% of respondents have been using Trip for more than a year with 35% using it for longer than 3 years.

I asked about the most important features relating to our content and these are the top 6 responses (those that were highlighted by more than 30% of the respondents):

  • Largest single searchable collection of ‘evidence-based’ content
  • Largest global collection of clinical guidelines
  • Many more systematic reviews than Cochrane
  • Content is from around the globe, for example USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Africa
  • Selected collection of PubMed’s leading clinical journals
  • Database of over 500,000 clinical trials

I also asked if there were many surprises – and there were lots of responses.  The main one being the lack of awareness of our image and video collections.  We clearly need to work hard on getting that message out.

I asked about the most important key features of Trip, the following are all those that polled over 30%:

  • Easy filtering of results to restrict to evidence types e.g. systematic reviews, guidelines
  • Monthly alert of new evidence linked to your interests
  • PICO search interface
  • Order the results by quality, relevance or date
  • Easy/Friendly interface with no steep learning curve
  • Advanced search interface
  • Colour coding scheme to make it easier to highlight high quality evidence

Our users seem keen to be alerted to clinical trials, jobs, conferences and books (most polled over 50% approval).

We asked about a Trip Evidence Service and most thought it was a good idea.  However, only 11% thought they would be able to find the money within their organisation.  But I’m encouraged as 11% is still high, given our large user base.

Most people appeared to be broadly supportive/understanding of our need to move to a freemium business model.

I listed a number of possible new premium features and those that polled greater than 20% (only the top 3 were higher than 30%):

  • Add in additional full-text articles
  • Creation of an ‘Answer Engine’ giving you instant answers to your clinical questions
  • PICO+. Based on the popular PICO search make it more user friendly and powerful
  • A ‘Help’ feature so if you can’t find what you need you can ask the wider Trip community
  • Providing education points based on your time using Trip
  • Improved emails highlighting evidence that is more likely to be useful to you
  • Introduce a ‘People who looked at this article, also looked at these articles’ features to highlight related articles
  • Improved export of records

Due to us using colour we asked about colourblindness and 3.2% said they were colourblind.  I’ve no idea how that compares to the wider population.  nearly 30% of the users reported “I am not colour blind and I was not aware that you used colour to help highlight the quality of the results”.  So, another communication challenge for us.

Finally, in looking through the ‘Any other comments’ section I was completely overwhelmed by the messages of love and support.  Knowing that makes my work so much easier.