Houston Affiliate

The Houston Affiliate of Susan G Komen has a tab labeled "education" that takes the viewer to a page that offers a variety of information, in a somewhat haphazard manner. There is topical information--"Headlines"--2008 statistics, a blurb about breast cancer generally, screening recommendations, breast cancer myths, some studies offered, and a left nav with a bunch of links to other pages that are equally disparate. As with San Antonio, and for that matter, Austin, there is little sense of what the user might be looking for on the page. Perhaps information should be sorted into categories of general (2008 stats, general cancer info) and personal (I am _years old-- do I need a mammogram?).

In this case the SEARCH FOR A FREE or LOW COST MAMMOGRAM FACILITY is located within the "screening recommendations section, which indicates that they know the information seeker is likely to be interested not in a general, aimless way but in the immediate. personal sense. Again, though, this link is just a word doc with phone numbers and addresses. I had heard that Houston undertook a collaboration to produce a service-provider map on the site, but this link was on the home page, not on the education page. I found it under the name breast cancer portal. There's lots of good stuff here, including legal services (which I have seen at no other affiliates) but again, it is just basically a list. The map is not on the affiliate site, it turns out, but rather here on the partner's Web site. It allows you to search by a total of 14 fields, some of which are duplicates--do you need Zip code and city/county?--and many need more explanation. There are terms used that will be mysteries to the vast majority of nonprofessionals, especially in the "clinic type" section. If the user has to call Komen with questions, the advantage to this degree of detail will be negligible.

While this interacive map is impressive in its way, and especially useful I think for a city as lage and diverse as Houston (I liked the "languages spoken" especially), I wonder at what point this degree of complexity becomes more trouble than it's worth in terms of keeping the info up to date and maintaining the technical aspects of the site. Would a list of providers in an geographic area, payments accepted, hours of operation (maybe), and some degree of clinic type not be more helpful? The user will have to contavt each clinic anyway. Then we could spend more of our page space explaining the meanings of some of the terms used, rather than providing an excessive number of searchable options. It also doesn't work in Firefox, and requires a software download to use.

The Komen Houston site, I think, is the extreme end of Web site sophistication, I think both more than we need and really more than we want for Austin. I think the next steps, now that I know what kinds of resources are offered in other cities, is to begin collecting usage data from Convio and researching some design principles to focus my work-up around. I have an intuitive sens of both of these aspects, but I think it's time to begin gathering data. I will, however, continue to hunt around for affiliate ideas we can borrow, for the duration of this project.

San Antonio Affiliate

I have begun my environmental scan of the Web sites of other Komen Affiliates, with regard to their presentation of educational material, and so far the best site I have seen belongs to our neighbors in San Antonio. They have education/health-information materials divided into "Education and Outreach" and "Resources." The education page contains a list of books, and the resources page has available pamphlets--none of which is available on the Austin site. While there are some design and editing issues--the link to "Children's Support Groups" takes you to a link of children support books--and it would be nice to see Web resources as well as books, the education section offers at least a place to start.

Both the resources and the free educational material however would benefit from a link or at least explanation as to how to acquire this material. For the brochures, should they call the office? Order from the national office? In effect, offering free material while useful in explaining what the office has may in fact result in creating more work for the affiliate in fielding these requests. I think that we should have something like the available materials page but link it to the National site and suggest that they be ordered from there. Although perhaps this would suggest that people should contact the National site for, say, health fair presentations, which is not desirable. I will have to figure out the best way to handle this. For the books, I wonder if the library has them? A link to the online catalog page might be a good way to go.

I was going to complain that the site had no local resources--but there is a link, hidden on the Resources page in small font, that says "Click here for a listing of local organizations providing low cost or free services to women." The link is a Word doc, with a list of addresses and phone numbers, much like the one our site. As with ours the focus is on free or low-cost mammograms, when in fact often women are looking for other services as well. There is also a certain amount of jargon--"patient navigation" and ambiguity--what are "services"? They have information about transportation, though, which is great. This site definitely gives me some ideas for ours, but I will keep looking to see if there are any affiliates who offer local resources in more depth, with more information, or with more features (like maps) built in.