writing for the web training for NICE

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) provides guidance and advice to healthcare professionals, local government and members of the public. Its aim is to improve health and social care across the UK.

Over the years the NICE website had become difficult to navigate. The organisation had a traditional broadcast model for posting to its site and weren’t in the habit of considering how users might find the information they needed. This led to the creation of a whole team dedicated to taking calls from people who couldn’t find what they were looking for on the website.

NICE needed its writers to understand who they were writing for, how to group content by user action, how to write in a way that helps people read online and how to improve their end-to-end content processes. Often writers were embedded in teams of healthcare professionals and would be overruled when they tried to write in plainer language.

We worked with NICE to create a bespoke training course that addressed each of their needs:

• understanding users and user needs

• writing for the web best practice

• advocating for content design

• content strategy and processes

As we were training over 60 people from across the communication, writing and enquiry-handling teams, we delivered the training multiple times to make sure everyone was included.

Using analytics from the NICE website and real examples of customer contacts, we helped them identify their users, map out their needs and put processes in place to make sure content was user focused and grouped in a way that users would find logical.

The course explained how people read online and that even experts familiar with a sector’s jargon find it easier to read and understand plain language – particularly on a computer screen. We paired this with tools and examples that the team could use when championing for clearer writing online.

By focusing on user needs and user’s end-to-end journey we were able to help the teams organise and prioritise content, improving the content and making it easier for users to find what they were looking for.

At the end of the course the teams had learnt new ways of working together and sharing best practice, and were more confident writing user-focused content and advocating for content design principles.