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Why don’t pharma companies focus on patient insights on their disease awareness websites?

I’ve got Ankylosing Spondylitis (AS), a chronic disease that causes inflammation of the joints. Sometimes it hurts like hell, yes, but here a few other things to my disease apart from pain:

• I don’t personally know anyone else who has AS
• I get a whole lot of symptoms but no one I read about on forums seems to have the same combination of symptoms as me
• I need to maintain a positive attitude and accept AS as a part of my life
• I worry that people think I am faking my disease so that I can get out of stuff
• And lots, lots more…

So what’s my point here? This blog isn’t a place for disease sufferers to air their thoughts. My point is that these are my insights about my disease. They are patient insights – small nuggets of reality for a patient that are not necessarily common knowledge to non-patients.

Consumer packaged goods marketers spend millions researching consumer insights and focus on these in virtually everything they do: online activities, advertising, packaging, product development, in store etc. But in the pharmaceutical industry this often doesn’t seem to be the case. For example, many disease awareness websites offer a medical overview of a disease but don’t contain much in the way of insights. You may get a patient story with an insight or two (this is a good start) but often you don’t even get these. I wonder sometimes how often real patients have been involved in the development of these sites.

I think pharma and healthcare is missing a trick. Well researched patient insights would make for much more relevant, engaging and useful disease awareness sites. What’s more, the patient insights are out there for the taking. The disease forums are full of them.

4 tips for improving online survey creation

Online survey tools like Zoomerang and Surveymonkey make it very easy for just about everyone to launch their own surveys. Whilst this is a good thing, it also means that there are a lot of surveys out there and people are getting survey fatigue. If you manage to persuade someone to do your survey, your next challenge is to make sure that they don’t drop off half way through and actually complete the whole thing. Here are 4 of my top tips for good survey creation:

Too many surveys are poorly thought out and structured and are far too long – this leads to high drop-offs. Before creating your survey, set out your research objectives and then compare your survey against these. Be ruthless about eliminating unnecessary questions. Don’t ask questions you can research using other means (e.g. webstats).

Survey flow is incredibly important. Start with easy, quick questions which help engage your respondent and gets them into the right frame of mind. However, bearing in mind that survey drop-offs tend to happen towards the end of the survey, you need to balance this with getting your most important questions in early.

Structure your questions in such a way that the answer can be given by multiple choice, ratings etc. Only use free response forms if you really have to. This makes it quicker and easier for the user. It also makes it easier for you to analyse and segment the data when you get the results.

Usability is also important. Test your surveys with several people and watch them fill them out. Ask them for commentary. It’s so easy to ignore a potential response (e.g. how many surveys have you completed (or dropped off!) where you want to select n/a but the surveyor has not included this as a possible response)

Best practice website navigation

We were recently asked to review a website for usability. One of the key pieces the client wanted to look at was navigation. Surprisingly, there’s not a huge amount available on the web about this. Even Jakob Nielsen, the guru of website usability is pretty quiet on the subject. So we pulled together a few thoughts and rules of thumb when it comes to creating a good website navigation:

Website users go to websites with goals in mind and perform tasks in order to achieve these goals. Information seeking is one of the most common goals on websites and especially intranets. Navigation is the primary tool for in-site information seeking. A good navigation makes for fast and successful information seeking.

Website navigation has undergone much standardisation over the years. Navigation bars, drop-down menus and sub-navigations are found across most sites, as are standard labels such as “home”, “about”, “contact us”, etc. Users sub-consciously expect sites to adhere to these standards. If sites don’t follow these standards, information seeking can be greatly impaired.

Secondary navigations (not to be confused with sub-navigations) are often missed and confuse users as to the categorisation, structure and priority of information presented.

Navigation labels should use concise and common language as this aids information seeking. Jargon should be avoided.

If you’ve got any any other navigation tips to add, please drop us a comment.

Woopra! A new web traffic analysis tool making waves

I meet a lot of people who say that Google Analytics (GA) does not provide enough depth for proper website traffic analysis. However, I still believe that GA is an excellent tool and I doubt that the depth of data provided by tools like Webtrends is actually useful for 99% of site owners. Web traffic analysis is a time consuming business and unless you put in the resource, most of the data available is wasted. GA does a great job of focusing on the stats that lead to the big learnings about your site and its traffic. You’ve got to walk before you can run.

Having said all of that, it is slightly worrying that GA dominates the analytics market so much. It’s important to keep Google on their toes. A new entrant to the market is doing just that: Woopra. Just like GA, Woopra provides a really intuitive and simple graphical interface. It’s also easy to set up and currently free. But what’s it got to offer that GA doesn’t?

One of the neatest features that caught my eye is the ability to be alerted in real time when there is someone on your site. You can then initiate a chat with this visitor and discuss their experience on your site. I have yet to try this out but it sounds cool. I imagine that you’re more likely to glean valuable qualitative input from users like this rather than inviting them to do an online survey (we all have survey fatigue now so these are lot less powerful than they used to be). Similarly, it’s cheaper than focus groups – not to mention the fact that a focus group of web users is a somewhat artificial setting versus talking to someone who’s actually on your site for real life reasons at the moment that you are quizzing them. Very powerful… but I have no doubt the usefulness of this type of tool is down to how you use it; the questions you ask; and also your ability not to scare away your visitors.

Some of the other features on Woopra are the ability to “tag” visitors so that you can track individuals and analyse their behaviour. Great if you are trying to understand what leads people to register, buy, etc. This leads into another area they are focusing on – traffic analytics for Web 2.0. Providing meaningful stats for blogs, social networking sites and the like is a largely untapped and little understood market. Finally, there’s also the possibility to search your traffic data: for example, you can search for specific pages to go straight to traffic data about them – a time saving tool rather than having to drill down into the data click-by-click.

So Woopra looks very promising with some innovative features. There’s plenty more to Woopra than I’ve covered here. However, a big question mark is the cost. It’s free whilst still in Beta mode but they do plan to start charging when they go to full release. With GA such a powerful and free tool, Woopra are going to have to really wow the socks off site owners to get them to switch. It’s one that we’re watching closely at Content Formula to help us enhance our site management and site support services.

Blogging with your mobile

There is a real buzz around user-created content on the web at the moment. The popularity of sites like YouTube are sound testament to this. But, in order to find genuinely original material you often have to wade through a mass of lifted TV and film footage. Even if you do find the true user-created nuggets you are searching for, the talking heads and candid action rely upon people who have access to camcorders, digital cameras, or the most high-tech mobile phones.

However, as mobiles become more advanced this seems set to change. Cameras are now a fairly standard feature on everyday handsets and even video capturing facilities of a higher quality are beginning to appear, bringing the world of videography to the masses.

At the recent Internet World exhibition we spoke to someone from Moblog.co.uk, a new website which encourages people to film and take snapshots using their phones, and then share them with everyone else by uploading. Effectively it’s a blog for mobiles, hence the name!

Moblog has already been recognised by some as a useful marketing tool. Pop music group ‘Girls Aloud’ have already been documenting their day to day activities on the website, which has created much interest amongst their fans. It remains to be seen if companies will attempt to monopolise Moblog with fake user-created content designed to carry a commercial message.

John Scott

Intranet healthchecks and going global

Content Formula (that’s us) will be exhibiting at Internet World from tomorrow Tuesday 1 May until Thursday.

Internet World is the UK’s biggest web-related show, and is held at Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre from 9.30am.

Come along and see us on stand W351 if you’d like to talk about your company’s intranet, websites, or online marketing. We’re giving away valuable expertise for free, including “Intranet Healthcheck” and “Going Global”.

Intranet Healthcheck will help you look at your intranet in a structured way, and think about the improvements you could make to it. Going Global is a chance to pick our brains about adapting your website for overseas markets.

Here’s how to register - it’s free to visit.

And here’s how to get to Earl’s Court. 

Another superb blog post – or why you should avoid big claims

Internet and intranet sites with news on their front pages often feature short introductions to the articles. Readers are then expected to click through and read the full text. 

It follows that writers and editors need to make these introductory blurbs or teasers as enticing as possible, to encourage click-throughs. 

Like any advertisement, your blurb can either show people why they should read on, or it can tell them. 

Showing would mean describing what they’ll find when they click through. Telling might mean assuring the reader it will be worth their time. 

Telling might involve saying “this fascinating article…” is “unmissable” … “essential reading” … “a scoop”.  

Telling people why they need to read your article can be highly effective, but is hazardous for the following reasons: 

1) People might not believe your blurb. Readers are used to big claims about what they’ll find when they click a link, and may treat them with scepticism. 

2) You risk inflating the language. If you describe an article as “essential”, how are you going to describe the next article and still hold your readers’ attention? “More essential”? 

3) You risk disappointing the reader, thereby diminishing your future credibility. If the reader decides an article you told them is wonderful is in fact a woeful mess, they’re less likely to believe other claims on your site. 

The bottom line? Use big claims sparingly. Show people why they might be interested in your post more often than telling them they will be. 

You can read more about blurbs on this weblog here. 

And there’s good advice from Poynter here. 

Flash video theory of relativity

A story of how Flash videos aren’t always where they ought to be when publishing online.

After I finish silently shouting abuse at the person who shot this video I’m trying to publish, I sit back and tell myself that filming is an ‘art’ and that us ‘techno-geeks’ have no right telling these artisans how to frame a shot.

At least its player looks great, and upon testing locally all seems fine. Uploading presents no problems…despite what others may think…this is an art. Finally a live test…never had a problem before. Whack all the files on the server and away we go. Except this time I’m uploading the video file and its player to a folder especially for media files, not in with the web page it is going to be displayed on.

Of course, it doesn’t work. Now I feel a fool, I can’t even do my own job properly, and there I was hurling mental abuse at the creative geniuses down at video HQ. What is called for here is a truly artistic approach…trial and error! (Those arty types will continuously refine their work but convince you it was all shot from the hip, I can be like them!)

So now I spend ages working out where I went wrong, test, test and test again, and no doubt allow frustration to get the better of me…include appropriate expletives (optional).

But finally I work it out, allowing me to pretend to you that I knew what was wrong all along:

When linking to the external video from flash, by default it is linked relative to the Flash file (swf). When published online, the swf is pulled into the HTML page which then changes the source of the swf and therefore the link to the video file. The video file must be linked to as though its player was located in the same folder as the HTML page.

Philip Spain

Reasons to blog – it’s not really about community

A frequent reaction to people who suggest internal company weblogs is “Why?” 

Why should we add another communications channel when we have e-mail, phone, Microsoft Project and pieces of paper? 

People have written books about this. But it’s always worth stressing the concrete, practical tasks you can achieve with this sort of technology. For a short version, James at Step Two Designs has summarised why his business uses internal blogs: 

• “summary of all the proposals that we send out, so everyone knows what’s in the pipeline
• updates on projects as they are unfolding
• new ideas and interesting tidbits that we come across
• updates on business development activities, including monthly financial reports
• internal broadcast messages and requests for help”

These types of example probably say more to a manager than a thousand words of theoretical text about “communities”, “collaboration”, and of course “Enterprise 2.0″.