Evaluation

The National Elf Service is committed to providing critically appraised summary blogs of high quality research. We also want to make sure that we do this in the best ways possible and that you can easily read, find, discuss and use the information to improve health care.

We have therefore taken our background in evidence-based health care and applied it to measuring the impact and effectiveness of our websites so we can understand what our users really think and make things work better. We do this is various ways:

  1. Hands on usability testing – we ask folk to try things out and see how they like them, but we do this in a systematic and evidence-based way
  2. Surveys – we regularly ask people to give us online feedback on what they get from the blogs, what they like about the National Elf Service and what we could do better.
  3. Analytics – we use programs to track who visits our sites and how they use them.
  4. Academic projects – we work with academics and students to explore how people get health information online and to understand more about how people use the blogs. We are working with Glasgow Caledonian University to discover how and why people use the National Elf Service. Find out more about this project here.