Useful Resources and Links

Useful Resources and Links

Below we have provided a list of useful resources and links that you might find useful when designing, developing and testing your internet-based interventions.

If you have any other suggestions for others creating interventions, please share them with us in the forum

Websites

LifeGuide Community Website

All resources for developing an intervention with LifeGuide can be found on the LifeGuide Community website. This site includes:

• the authoring tool,
• publications from the LifeGuide team,
• intervention demos
• and details of how you can upload your own interventions for:
  • discussing with your research team,
  • testing with end-users
  • and for launching your finished intervention on the LifeGuide Server.

The Health of the Net Foundation

The reliability of information online is an important issue to consider when viewing and developing interventions relating to people’s health. This website details all you need to know to ensure your health intervention meets recommendations for being reliable and useful for end-users. You can check your intervention against their checklist to ensure it meets their HON principles

Web Accessibility

The following two links are useful for ensuring that your interventions meet the requirements for being accessible to all of your end-users including people with disabilities.

• Web accessibility Initiative
• Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and Web Accessibility

Website Usability

The Usability.Gov website has everything you need to ensure your intervention is useful and usable for your end-users. E.g. thinking about the purpose and goals of the site, things to think about when writing for the web, and methods for checking and testing the usability of a site,

Website Credibility

Follow The Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab’s Web Credibility Project. In particular, you can follow their ten useful guidelines for making your online intervention credible.

Images

The following websites give access to hundreds of royalty and therefore copyright-free images that you can include in your interventions. Many images are also free to download whereas others require a small fee.

Stock xchng

Istock photo

Images can also be sourced from Microsoft PowerPoint. Alternatively, if you cannot find the image you want on any stock photography website but have found an image on another person’s website it is advisable to e-mail them for permission before using it in your own site.

How people read websites

A useful webpage for a description of how people read on the web and how to write for the web

Books and Research Articles

• Krug, S. (2006). Don’t make me think: A common sense approach to Web Usability (2nd Ed). New Riders Publishing: USA.
• Krug, S. (2010). Rocket surgery made easy: The do-it-yourself guide to finding and fixing usability problems. New Riders Publishing: USA.

These two highly readable and often humorous short books focus on designing web pages that are usable for end-users and how to find and test any usability issues. We would thoroughly recommend reading these books if you are new to web design and usability testing.

• Fogg, B. J. (2003).Persuasive Techology. Using computers to change what we think and do. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers: USA.

This book shows you how websites can be used to change people's attitudes and behaviour. We particularly recommend reading the following chapters:

Chapter 3 - Computers as persuasive tools, Chapter 5 - Computers as persuasive social actors, and Chapter 6 - Credibility and computers.