European Medicines Agency seeking participants for website user-testing research

29 January 2013

The European Medicines Agency is looking to recruit volunteers from the pharmaceutical industry to help test some new, improved features for its main corporate website, ema.europa.eu.

The Agency is always looking for ways to improve its websites for key stakeholder groups such as patients, healthcare professionals and the pharmaceutical industry. With this in mind, it has been working on a redevelopment of some key areas of this website for the last few months.

During this stage of the project, the Agency is looking to recruit volunteers fitting the following profiles:

• Regulatory intelligence / affairs: You have day-to-day responsibility for monitoring the Agency's website for updates, making sure that relevant information goes to the right people in your organisation. You also assist others within your organisation in finding and interpreting guidance from the Agency.
• Pharmaceutical workforce (large company): You work for a large pharmaceutical company. Your job means that you need to make extensive use of scientific guidelines or regulatory and procedural documents from the Agency. You might be a clinical-studies director, a pharmacovigilance specialist or a product-development manager.
• Pharmaceutical workforce (small or medium-sized enterprise): You work for a small or medium-sized (SME) pharmaceutical company. The size of your company means that you do not have an in-house regulatory-intelligence team and either have to share responsibility for keeping other staff updated or are reliant on an outsourced regulatory-intelligence provider. You might be a clinical-studies director, a pharmacovigilance specialist or a product-development manager, or you might be the director of a company.
• Online submissions and Telematics: You are responsible for compiling and submitting data through systems including eSubmission and EudraVigilance. You might also be responsible for compiling and submitting data to support a clinical-trial application using EudraCT.

Volunteers will also need to be regular users of the Agency's websites, although it does not matter if they are new to this role. Volunteers will also need to be comfortable using a web browser, but do not need to have any knowledge of web design.

Information about the sessions

• The user-testing sessions will be held in central London from 11 to 14 February 2013.
• The sessions will last one hour and will be run by a user-experience expert.
• The sessions may be recorded. The recordings will be used for internal analysis only. Volunteers' names and the name of their companies will not appear in any reports.
• There are a limited number of places available.
• The Agency is unable to reimburse the costs of attending the session.

Expressing interest

If you are interested in attending the user testing in London or would like to be involved in the Agency's initiative around improving its websites generally, please e-mail [e-mail], giving details of your job role and an indication of your familiarity with the Agency's websites.

These user-testing sessions form part of a long-term initiative to improve the Agency's online presence. The Agency also intends to work with patient, consumer and healthcare-professional organisations, as well as with other stakeholders, on user-experience research later in 2013.