How we developed this site

We developed this site in just over a year from April 2015 until launch in June 2016.

The academic mathematicians and statisticians wrote first drafts of the content in May 2015, with feedback from communication experts at Sense about Science and the academic psychologists at King’s College London. Over the next 10 months, Sense about Science held four sets of two workshops, to test the web content. At each stage, one workshop was with interested potential users (e.g. press officers; health journalists; policy professionals) and the other workshop was with parents of children who had heart surgery. At each stage, we invited different individuals to attend each workshop in order to test the updated content with people who had not seen the previous versions. We also asked participants from past workshops to provide feedback on the animations and website as they developed.

As the website took shape in the autumn of 2015, the academic psychologists at King’s College London did formal tests of specific sentences and concepts discussed in the website to see if one way of explaining the concepts worked better than another and to pinpoint where there was possibility for confusion. We also shared the evolving website with the clinical community including surgeons, intensive care doctors, the national audit body, data experts and cardiologists, to incorporate their feedback too.

Over time, the website took shape, evolving a great deal over the year in response to the workshops, the psychology experiments and other feedback. We user tested everything from layout to colours to language to page navigation and very little remains from the original draft content.

Sense about Science have also produced a free practical guide for researchers on how to engage the public based on the model we used for this website.

Looking back, we cannot thank all those who gave feedback enough – this website is immeasurably better with their input than it would otherwise have been. Any niggles that remain are our responsibility alone.

We would also like to thank our funder, the UK National Institute of Health Research, for encouraging us to think ambitiously about how to develop this site and giving us the time and money to do it.

Explanatory videos

Very many thanks to Leighton Pugh for donating his time and expertise to narrating both videos. The artwork and production for both videos was with developed in collaboration with Qudos Animations. We thank them for their great work and responsiveness in working to tight deadlines.