EuOrphan

Project Objective

The EuOrphan project focuses on the European orphan medicine market (rare diseases) by providing a number of on-line services supporting the spread of information about orphan drugs and related rare diseases. The services address the needs of four main user categories: pharmaceutical companies, public health institutions, physicians and researchers, and patients and associations.

The services, which are accessed primarily through the EuOrphan web site, include a database of orphan drugs and related diseases, statistics on orphan medicines, access to experts in the orphan drugs market, a discussion forum and other related information, such as news and hospital specializing in rare diseases.

Assistance Provided

The EuOrphan project was aware that the success of the project depended on developing a solution that addressed real user needs. Not only must the solution be useful but also usable. Low accessibility of the services and the information offered to target user groups would result is a less than optimum usage of those services.

An initial introductory telephone conference was set up between the project and Tenuta to review the needs for usability and accessibility and to decide how Tenuta could provide the most effective form of support. It was agreed that Tenuta would review the usability and accessibility of the EuOrphan web solution and present the results at a workshop.

Tenuta carried out an expert assessment of the usability of the EuOrphan web site over two days, and documented a detailed list of issues.

The two day workshop was conducted in Genoa with five project members. On the first day Tenuta gave a brief presentation on the principles of usability and user centred design, and then reviewed the site page by page, explaining the usability issues. This provoked a lively discussion of the role of the site in supporting the EuOrphan project objectives, and what improvements could be made.

On the second day the accessibility results were presented, and then there was a detailed discussion of a possible new information architecture for the site, and the main contents of important pages.

This was followed by a discussion of recommended future actions, and the potential benefits of obtaining in depth feedback from users by carrying out user trials.

Further Actions

The workshop resulted in specific design change requests to the solution and a road map for continued review and improvement. Additional assistance was given to an EuOrphan project meeting in Stockholm to help gain feedback from prospective users.

Project Comments

"Tenuta usability and accessibility support was extremely efficient and useful. The Tenuta review provided us with what we needed to address the problems our project is facing now: a service streamlined and focused on the real user needs. We were provided an interactive analysis of the service main motivations and objectives and the redesign of the EuOrphan service. Moreover we gained very useful insight into how to test and measure the service usability and to evaluate the service success."

--Enrico Morten of Softeco, Italy and EuOrphan's technical manager

Final Reports

The following reports of the findings and recommendations from the usability and accessibility audits of the EuOrphan project may be of interest:

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