Development of a user-centered website: Lessons learned from Community-Based Prevention Marketing for Policy Development

Background: Advances in information communication technology (ICT) creates and strengthens opportunities to disseminate evidence-based practices and translate research to practice. Unfortunately, public health practitioners have little guidance on how to structure, implement, and sustain ICT to achieve maximal impact.

Program background: This presentation will describe evidence-based website design principles applied during the development of the Community-Based Prevention Marketing (CBPM) for Policy Development training website to equip practitioners with the tools necessary to ensure maximal ICT impact.

Evaluation Methods and Results: Development of the training website consisted of three phases guided by literature and formative research. The pre-production phase focused on agenda setting and resource management. The production phase was an iterative cycle of user-centered design and beta testing. The post-production phase implemented the training website, and ensured sustainability through search engine optimization (SEO).

Conclusions: In the pre-production phase, agenda setting consisted of forming a team to guide website production and to establish a strategic direction that maintained momentum and coordinated tasks towards a common goal. In the production phase, the team agreed upon the creation of a user persona to guide user-centered design. The persona helped define cognitive function by focusing on user learning styles and time availability to minimize cognitive burden and maximize learning. The persona also guided website organization, appropriateness of color scheme and symmetry to reduce visual complexity.

Implications for research and/or practice: The training website was beta tested with a local coalition, in the design, implementation and evaluation of a policy change. Lessons learned from implementation have been incorporated into the website structure and have led to a creation of a section for nascent community coalitions and established community coalitions. Continued sustainability is being ensured via SEO techniques, such as keyword optimization and link management and through migration of training materials to CDC TRAIN.