Feedback collection & implementation

To make sure we’re developing a website that lives up to its purpose and works for the target group (students on the final year of their entry level diploma and novice PTs), we worked closely with our prospective users during the making of getPTsmart.com. In total we had 20+ meetings with professionals, including meetings with our coach and client, professors in clinical reasoning and HOAC II specialists. We very much appreciate all the feedback, suggestions and criticism we have received from all fronts throughout the project and have done our best to consider as much of it as feasible in the current version of getPTsmart.com.

Mid-way through the main development phase we arranged a feedback evening with a sample of the target group, represented by 6 final year students from the European School of Physiotherapy who had a varied level of clinical reasoning skills. The students worked their way around the first draft of getPTsmart.com and did one of the case studies (and ate a good pile of our home-made pizza – you got to be well-fed to work well).

Here is a summary of the main feedback themes we identified from the student feedback. The feedback we received from our teachers mainly covered the same topics and was very similar. In the last half of the production phase we went through the cycle of discussing, redefining and specifying our ideas for possible solutions with our professors over and over and over again. The process was invaluable.

Main feedback themes

I’m used to a certain electronic patient documentation system (e.g. Abakus) – why should I bother with a new system and HOAC II?

Our response & actions:

• We clarified the purpose of getPTsmart.com on the homepage. For this we developed a catchy slogan for the homepage that immediately emphasises that getPTsmart.com is for learning to structure your mind for clinical reasoning.
• We developed the six points under ‘Why getPTsmart.com?’ in which we give short and precise foundations for our choice of tools and content.

I feel lost going through the case steps. If I don’t figure out a website after 15 min, I’m gone for good.

Our response & actions:

• We moved the actions to take to the top of each clinical reasoning section to emphasize purposeful, hypotheses-driven clinical reasoning. We changed the display of the actions to take in a way that clearly distinguishes each step and emphasises working through the sections in a step-by-step manner. This was the very first idea anyway!
• We removed the actions to take from the Toolbox as the students spent too much time trying to learn each step before actually starting to work with the case study. Initially we had placed the actions to take in the Toolbox for the user to get an overview.
• We refined and refined the text in the actions to take. We met with HOAC II specialists whose input led us to especially clarify the first section of the actions to take and to emphasise the inclusion of anticipated problems in the first two sections. We also further defined and specified the terminology and dictionary items.