Your feedback, our responses
Recently we asked you to comment on edpsy – your loves, niggles and suggestions for improvement – 86 of you lovely lot responded, so here’s a summary of your feedback and some of our responses.
How easy you find using the website
87% of respondents said they find using the site ‘easy’ or ‘really easy’. This obviously made Rich (digital) very happy…
It’s great to hear so many of you find the site easy to use.
There’s definitely work to be done though. Over the next few months we’ll be working to make it easier for visitors to see everything the site has to offer, and to discover related articles that may interest them.
Perceived value of edpsy to the wider profession
86% of respondents said they either ‘value’ or ‘highly value’ the contribution of edpsy to the EP profession. This frankly made us feel a bit chuffed! We’re extremely pleased that our contribution is seen as valuable to the profession as a whole. Of course, this wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of all our blog and feature authors so, really, this is a testament to their motivation, creativity and support.
Much of the qualitative and anecdotal feedback about this focused on increasing the visibility of the profession and promoting a supportive and collaborative atmosphere between EPs.
We’re going to try our utmost to ensure that our contribution remains valued by publishing content that stays relevant and timely.
Perception of our blogs and features
95% of respondents found our blogs and features engaging and informative. Wow… Round of applause for all our contributing authors.
Using the events calendar
55% of respondents had looked at our events calendar. This one did surprise us as our events calendar is fast becoming the most popular part of the site. Viewer numbers for our events calendar are high and so we expected a greater proportion of visitor to have looked at it. Of course we’re aware of the sampling limitations of our feedback but ideally we’d like our events calendar to be more widely known and referred to. Emily, who coordinates event listings says…
We list a wide range of events and a popular time seems to be the autumn – so we have a lot going on for you to browse in September, October and November. As the website brings together training from all over the UK, if you haven’t yet looked at the events calendar, you may well have training happening on your doorstep so I’d urge you to find out. Don’t forget to add any events you’re hosting to the site, we aim for them to be visible within one week.
Awareness of our ‘Interest Group’ section
Only 35% of respondents were aware that we have a section on the site that lists Interest Groups. This isn’t particularly surprising as it is our newest feature and one still under development.
We’re already getting feedback from people who have listed interest groups about how these pages could work better for them. As they grow and develop, we expect that they will become increasingly visible and useful.
If you run or know of a group that other EPs might like to know about, you can add an interest group.
Main reason for visiting the site
| Reason | % of respondents |
|---|---|
| Blogs and features | 66 |
| 'Training to be an EP' information | 17 |
| Events | 15 |
| Special Interest Groups | 2 |
Your ideas for development and improvement
Lots of our respondents had ideas for things that we could do or improve. We’ve conducted a very basic thematic analysis on all the suggestions we had (35 in total), and will address these by theme.
A forum for EPs
The short answer to this is that we are not going to establish a forum.
From the start of edpsy we’ve thought long and hard about whether to create a forum on the site and it’s something that some users have suggested a few times. There are several reasons why we’ve taken the decision not to run one:
- We really don’t have the time to do it. Moderating a forum is a huge task! In order to make a forum work we’d need to be on hand every day to ensure the smooth running and moderation of comments… but we all work full time. Some of the feedback suggested that a closed forum would be useful, but such an approach wouldn’t fit with the values of openness and engagement at edpsy.
- EPNET is already a thriving online forum with thousands of members and it wouldn’t be a good use of our limited time and resources to compete with something so well established. In establishing a forum there is a risk of damaging both by fragmenting the audience of EPNET. A number of comments both in your feedback and openly on EPNET have suggested that a different forum would be welcome because of the perceived tone of EPNET, sometimes. In our opinion, it is within the power of EPNET’s users to change that tone, and creating another forum doesn’t necessarily solve that problem.
- There isn’t enough evidence to suggest that people would come back to a forum time and again. We already engage with our users through email, Facebook, Twitter and EPNET to let you know when there is something new on the site. We realise that people return to EPNET because it is operates on a system of email notifications which is not something we would want to do.
A section to share resources
We love this idea! It was the most frequent suggestion for improvement that we had and we can see that there is a real gap for EPs to talk about, share and discuss various resources that they make use of in their practice.
We think that this idea can be subsumed in to the existing ‘blogs’ section of the site and that ‘Resources’ just becomes a regular series of postings. We’re currently thinking about the ethical implications of sharing resources and some of the issues that might arise due to copyright (e.g. through posting photos). In the meantime, if there’s a resource that you’d like to highlight to peers and colleagues – get in touch!
“We want more content!”
So do we! Our second most common suggestion was to post more blogs and feature articles. Of course we totally agree but (*tongue in cheek*) if you want to see more content…you need to write it! The site is essentially for EPs, by EPs and is made possible by the fabulous contributions of our guest authors. We’re always seeking engaging, informative and creative content so please do send us through your ideas and blog posts.
Aside from the above, we’re thinking through a range of ideas to structure our content a bit more, which will hopefully offer some encouragement for budding authors who just don’t know what to write about (e.g. a ‘resources’ series).
A sub-theme to this was about us doing something to support navigation around the site so people could discover what other content we have. As Rich hinted at above, we’re working on introducing a ‘You may also like…’ tool.
Signposting to research and literature
Quite a few people requested that we link to journals and literature that may be useful or of interest to EPs. We already do this to some extent on our Facebook and Twitter, but we realise that not everyone will have these or feel comfortable using them. One of the key difficulties here will be ensuring that anything we post viz. research or literature is open access – there’s no point sending our users to journal articles that are locked behind paywalls.
We’re going to mull this over because we think it’s something that could be relatively easy to do and very useful. In fact… we’ve already started by reproducing a recent EPNET conversation where members suggested books for an Alternative Provision library.
Be more interactive and use multimedia
Videos and podcasts also cropped up quite a bit in your suggestions. We like this idea too so watch this space…
Thank you!
Thank you to everyone who contributed their feedback. It really does help us ensure that edpsy is doing and providing what you want.
More from edpsy:
Interesting and thorough reflections, and I totally understand re not developing a competing forum. Thanks for all the work you put in to maintaining and developing this resource. I will endeavour to write another article for EdPsy at some point, although I have a writing commitment with some TEPs that I need to honour first!