Search

Trip Database Blog

Liberating the literature

Open Search
Month

November 2014

Professions in Trip Profile

When you register with Trip you are asked to select your profession, the current list is shown below:

The above 9 options are simply not good enough as around a quarter of users select the ‘Other’ option (and I can’t imagine these users are made to feel particularly special!).  Also, as we want to offer increasingly personalised information, the more granular the detail we have on a person the better.  So, in our recent surveys I asked people to tell us their profession and from that I have come up with a more comprehensive list:

Academic researcher
Dentist
Dental – other
Dietician/nutritionist
Doctor/physician – other
Doctor/physician – primary care
Doctor/physician – secondary care
Educator
Librarian/Information specialist
Medical laboratory scientist
Midwife
Nurse
Nurse lecturer
Nurse practitioner
Nurse, clinical specialist
Ophthalmologist
Optometrist
Paramedic
Patient/carer
Public health professional
Pharmacist
Physical therapist/physiotherapist
Physician assistant
Retired
Speech and language
Student
Other

Expect to see the changes in early 2015

1

Communicating the evidence ‘types’

Those who use Trip will possibly have noticed small thumbnails to the right of each search result (see image 1 below).  The idea is that they are a small screenshot of the actual page which people can rollover to see a preview of the actual result  They are problematic as it’s currently broken so we only have screenshots for around half of them.  Also, they are moderately resource intensive.

So, we need to decide to fix them or remove them or replace them with something else – hence this post.

One idea I’ve got is to use the space to give additional information to users to help them understand the evidence they’re looking at.  For instance, we could use it to give a clearer idea of the likely strength of evidence.  We currently do this via the use of colour flashes but unfortunately many people miss this.  The colour flashes link the individual article to the colours used in the filter section (so green indicates higher quality evidence etc.).  Below are some images that are an attempt to show what it might look like.  I’d appreciate you looking at them (click on the image to enlarge it) and then go to this survey to let us know what you think.  There are only 4 questions so it shouldn’t take long.

Thank you in advance.

6

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑