We’ve just invited our AskTrip tester panel to try the latest version of AskTrip. This is the third and final phase of testing, with each phase introducing some significant improvements. We’ve taken a staged approach because this is a big upgrade, and we didn’t want to overwhelm testers with too many changes all at once.

The most significant change is the introduction of Explore further. One of the things we’ve learnt from testing AskTrip is that a single answer is not always the end of the process. Sometimes you want more detail, sometimes you want to focus on a particular population or outcome, sometimes you want to challenge the interpretation, and sometimes you simply want to tell us that we may have got something wrong. Explore further is designed to make all of that easier. It allows users to drill down into an answer, ask follow-up questions, request clarification, or give feedback directly from the answer itself. We’re especially keen for testers to try this feature, as it is likely to become an important part of how AskTrip supports more useful, iterative evidence-based searching.

We’ve also improved the evidence scoring. AskTrip now takes account of Trip’s own quality scores for guidelines, randomised controlled trials and systematic reviews, so weaker items should be reflected more appropriately in the overall assessment of the answer.

Another change is to answer length. We have removed the previous “standard” and “long” options and now provide a single, fuller answer by default. In testing, the difference between the two options was not always meaningful enough to justify keeping both.

Finally, AskTrip answers can now be downloaded as PDFs, making it easier to save, share or review them later.

This phase of testing is open for two weeks and will allow us enough time to make the necessary changes ahead of AskTrip’s one year anniversary (25th June)