I was in Suffolk last week at a meeting of their SDS Implementation Network. Chris Pyburn, whom we’re working with on the Suffolk Stakeholder Engagement project, had set up in the corner a board game produced by In Control. ‘My Life, My Budget’, is, according to In Control, ‘a fun and interactive, cool and colourful board game for people with learning difficulties and other disabilities who want to know more about Personal Budgets’.

We didn’t have a chance to road test the game, but it was certainly very professionally produced. You can find out more about the board on the In Control website, and below is a short video.

It’s been a busy week, but we’re very pleased to go live with the new CareKnowledge designs. A couple of months ago we rolled out our new email design, which was well-received. One minor nuisance with the email was that something in the new design was causing a problem for a small number of our users. After much trial and error, we identified the @ in info@careknowledge.com as being the guilty party.

With the new design we wanted to make the site visually more attractive, to improve navigation, and to reduce the length of some of the pages. Here’s a screenshot, and below that some discussion about the rationale behind the redesign.

So to achieve this we :

• improved the left-hand column navigation bar by adding images and making the text larger
• aded a highlights box at the top of the main pages, with an image, and buttons to click through the highlights – to give visual impact, and to reduce the page length
• removed the longer list of recent additions by category (policy, legislation, research etc), and giving this resource it’s own page, and linking to this via the right hand column, with ‘library’ highlighted above the Topic Views
• put a link at the top of the right column to tell users whereabouts in CareKnowledge they are
• made some tweaks to font sizes and colours

I’m pleased with the way it’s turned out. There are probably a couple of extra tweaks we could make to the design, and we’ll try to gather feedback from our users about the changes to help us fine-tune even further.

So please do let us know what you think. Get into CareKnowledge and navigate around the site. Put some comments on the site where you see something you like, or where you can see something that could be improved. Email us at info@careknowledge.com, or post a comment under this blog.