Planning your toolkit

1. Project management. 

Project management is essential even for a small toolkit. You need to plan and organise the project resources, plan and timescales, create the project team and guide it through all stages of the work to project completion.  The Usability.gov website has useful guidance on project team roles and responsibilities that you might want to consider.

it is essential to understand who you are designing the toolkit for, what kinds of decisions they need to make, and what they want to achieve by using the toolkit. For example, creating a toolkit to support self-management by members of the public or shared decision-making will require quite a different approach from a toolkit that delivers specialist clinical guidance to experienced healthcare professionals.

User research methods will help you to understand user needs, behaviours and motivations. The Usability.gov website provides guidance on a  range of user research methods, including interviews, focus groups, card sorting, use of prototypes (mock-ups of your site) and usability assessment.

Information architecture design focuses on organising, structuring and presenting information so that users can quickly and easily access critical information to support their decisions and deliver on important goals. Key elements of information architecture include:

• How you categorize and structure information within your toolkit content hierarchy
• Labelling: How you label and represent information in a consistent and logical way.
• Navigation: How users browse or move through information
• Search: How users find information using the search functionality

Your content strategy will focus on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content within your toolkit.  This includes narrative content, images and multimedia. The standard operating procedure for Managing the content lifecycle gives useful guidance.

In planning your content strategy, you need to take into account that user behaviour on websites and mobile apps is quite different from how they read hard-copy text. They read at most 20% of the content on a page, and jump from one point to another using visual cues such as hyperlinks, images and formatted text.

Guiding principles of creating content for digital decision-making tools include:

1. Use bullets, lists and subheadings. Digital audiences frequently scan online content for highlights. By using bullet points, lists, subheads and other strategies, you can align your content with the visual needs of your audience.
2. Frontload your key messages - i.e. make your most important points early on the page. Most users don’t read “below the fold,” i.e., they don’t scroll down when consuming online content. 
3. Eliminate unnecessary words. Web copy needs to be concise and succinct. Getting rid of unnecessary words makes copy crisper, more concise and easier for users to digest.
4. Understand what you want the user to do next. Design your pages to motivate the user to take the appropriate next step. The next step could be downloading a content asset, going deeper into the site for more information or other steps that move the user along the clinical pathway or learning pathway. Create Calls to Action - usually buttons, or highlighted links -   in a way that makes it easy for the user to understand what they should do next.
5. Apply appropriate writing style and level.

Useful guidance includes:

• The Right Decision Service style guide and accessible content guidance.
• Writing in Plain English  from the Plain English Campaign
• Readability tools including the Hemingway Editor app and the Microsoft Editor tool which automatically gives you the Flesch-Kincaid readability score. Language equivalent to a reading age of 9 to 11 maximum is recommended for content intended for the general public.