Designing the ENABLE Repository: a tale of three researchers
A Short-Term Scientific Mission experience Israel - Switzerland & Spain (remote)
One might ask why we need STSMs? What is the use of spending money and time traveling to other countries when electronic aids, remote technologies and participatory platforms make it possible to communicate in real time over geographical distances. Why leave the convenience of one’s office, one’s research team, the family restaurant where one meets colleagues for lunch, one’s favorite coffee shop — and “waste” time earmarked research to travel to unfamiliar places, where you don’t feel part of the conversations that are conducted in a foreign language.
But this is exactly the reason why a STSM is a great idea. The fact that you are disconnected from home and daily duties, the fact that you are detached from your academic milieu and its small talk and jargon, and you walk down a different route each morning to the hosting faculty — This is exactly the reason that makes a STSM such a fruitful and enriching experience.
I assume that most of STSM missions are pre-planned, and some tasks are defined in advance and precisely scheduled, but I must admit that many of the most interesting things happen in activities that were not planned in advance. Therefore, there should be ‘holes’ in your schedule. Leave them open to allow experience the unpredicted!
As someone who has been on a post-doctorate and several sabbaticals in different countries over the course of my professional career, I can confirm that there is something special about an STSM. In a sabbatical, I tried to enrich my academic background (and even had to justify to the university why the sabbatical was important to my research). Here, however, I devoted the time and effort to an interesting and refreshing external topic that was only indirectly related to my main research. At least, that was the situation in my case…
My STSM mission included a full 5 days of work at the Department of Public Health in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Basel, together with Dr Janette Ribaut, and Dr Alex Dima. Alex was unfortunately unable to join us physically but was in continuous contact with us remotely. The STSM included work on the ENABLE project, exposure to the academic activities of the Department of Public Health chaired by Prof Sabina De Geest, and her PhD student Janette Ribaut, and meetings with students and faculty, designed to increase visibility and awareness of the COST action and promote collaborations.
The STSM started on Monday morning with an introduction to all materials of the ENABLE repository collected to date, the criteria for including technologies of medication adherence that were developed by Janette and Alex and were also used in Janette’s doctoral thesis. We systematically went through the detailed Excel sheets, and looked for categories and items that could be condensed and improved. The aim was to re-explore the data from the viewpoint of Human Factors, design, and the physiological relationship between humans and their environment, using my academic experience.
The ENABLE repository is an innovative, impressive and prestigious project, a project that deserves a lot of compliments to its founders, holding important and helpful information for medication users and caregivers, healthcare professionals, physicians, researchers, companies, healthcare administrators, policymakers, technology developers, insurance companies and more.
The main aim of the STSM was to increase visibility of the data and help in improving the navigation and information search process. To extend our knowledge in the fields of digital databases of technologies and products, we proceeded in two directions:
- We studied databases of commercial non-medical consumer websites (e.g., online shop, book repository), as well as existing databases of medication adherence technologies, and performed Task Analyses for understanding options and issues related to data presentation on digital platforms.
- We assessed the type of information that is displayed and the display configuration, identified the issues that require resolution, what the display is missing and how it can be improved.
In website navigation design, there’s no one “right” way… there are several options that can be applied in different ways to obtain a range of user experiences in different domains (commercial medical and non-medical, scientific, consumer professional, fashion). You can build horizontally or vertically, with drop down menus or icons, free text or filters, object based, action based, or disease based, design different user flows, all of which can end up providing or not providing an optimal user experience.
During the 5 working days of the STSM, we addressed some of those issues, adding the perspective of human factors and the physiological aspects of the human-environment relationship, and applying a design approach to the content and layout of the ENABLE repository of medication adherence technologies. Due to the limited time available to us, we did not reach a conclusion regarding the final format of the website during the STSM. However, the output of this week of working together was part of what later became the repository we can now see on the ENABLE website. Our collaboration continued during the repository development, and I hope it will continue in the next years even after the current COST action will be officially ended.
A week of studying websites and reviewing the ENABLE taxonomy through a human factors lens.
… contributed to what later became the ENABLE repository (below an admin view of the technology description entry form) and to many other ideas and activities related to medication adherence technologies within the ENABLE network, and, we hope, long-term collaborations and friendships.
