Planning your toolkit

RDS Learning and support

It is recommended that before starting on development of your toolkit, you invest time in planning  design and content.  This will help you to create a toolkit that directly supports the types of decisions your users need to make. It will also ensure that you provide users with a positive user experience so that they value the toolkit and keep coming back to it.

You can refer to the Right Decision Service implementation guide for an overview of the overarching strategic development lifecycle for all types of decision support, including and beyond RDS toolkits. The stages in the lifecycle work from stakeholder engagement and definition of outcomes and goals through to design, delivery, embedding in practice and evaluating impact.  

The guidance below focuses specifically on design and content of RDS toolkits.

Seven principles of a positive user experience

Peter Morville, a thought-leader in information architecture and user experience, defines seven core principles of creating a rewarding user experience. These principles will support you in planning for creation of a useful and usable toolkit:

  1. Useful: Your toolkit should fulfill a need that is not met by other resources.
  2. Usable: The toolkit  must be easy to use
  3. Desirable: Use of images, branding and other design elements should be engaging and create a positive experience for the user. 
  4. Findable: For decision support tools it is especially important that users can quickly and easily navigate to the key content they require, both online (web) and offline (mobile app). 
  5. Accessible: Content needs to be accessible to people with disabilities. Refer to the RDS standard operating procedure on creating accessible content.
  6. Credible: Users need to have confidence in the quality and reliability of the information in your toolkit.  The quality assurance checklist which RDS toolkit providers are required to complete and have approved by the RDS team prior to publication of a toolkit provides this assurance around the credibility of RDS content.
  7. Valuable: Your toolkit should deliver on important goals and outcomes for the user and the organisation.

Key elements of planning your toolkit

- are listed below

1. Project management

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.

2. Understanding user needs and goals

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.

 

3. Information architecture

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

4.Content strategy

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: