Things have been hectic, but as always exciting in the last few weeks. The site has come a long way since then. Among the readily visible changes are the much neater home page, a site tour and a much faster Google suggest like drop down in the trial search box (we call it intellisense). But these are just a few of the seemingly minute details one has been going through. With just one objective. Superior Usability and User Experience. Because we have to win (and wow) our users.
Usability of several sites that provide clinical trial listings or e-recruitment services has been less than desired. And this has been the status quo for years. In fact not much has changed since 2001, when a Forrestor study by Barrett found 18 clinical trials related websites lacking in user experience. Only 3 sites in the study received a positive score (on a scale from -40 to 40). One can clearly see the stark difference between such sites and the super-uber user friendly, hip web 2.0 sites of today.
I recently stumbled upon quite a few clinical trials listing sites through google’s sponsored links that are almost closed to being a MFA (Made for adsense) site. A user can easily get lost in the myriad links and the several Google ads on such sites. Some others, lack brand value or content comprehensiveness; for instance, a site that heavily advertises on Google, didnt produce any results for “breast cancer trials and 3 non-relevant results for ALS trials.
At Trialx we want our users, specially the patients/participants to have a “pain-free” experience. We have tried to reduce the cognitive burden on patients to comprehend which trial in a search result of more than dozens fits them, by building a matching interface. We also dont overwhelm them with dozens of links. Our signup process is famously said to take less than “38 seconds”. We absolutely do NOT want them to perform an extra click, if we can avoid it. We strive to give them accurate matching results and only for those trials that are still recruiting (why even list a trial that doesn’t enroll patients anymore, as some well established sites do). And we do our best to ensure the security of our user’s health information.
We have gone through repeated discussions and many development iterations to come to where we are. And we are still not done. For example, our matching interface still needs work. Our intellisense feature could reduce one mouse movement. And so on and so forth. The point is, we have to make this as easy as 1-2-3 and the task has only just begun.
