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Many quality improvement interventions such as educational programmes, hospital quality strategies, and quality evaluation systems have not been evaluated. The aim of this paper is to encourage research into these “quality improvement processes” by presenting suitable designs and methods, and by describing research approaches which are less familiar in healthcare. The paper proposes that the choice of research design depends on the level and complexity of the intervention. Theory‐building approaches are more suitable than experimental theory testing approaches for evaluating higher‐level complex interventions and for understanding critical context factors. Collaborative action evaluation studies can provide useful information for decision makers – an example is given. “User focused” research can provide knowledge for developing more effective quality intervention processes and for making better decisions about their use and implementation.

The paper reports on the findings of a survey of 115 (76 per cent) of English local authorities in 2016 which compared progress on the implementation of the Making Safeguarding Personal (MSP) approach in local authorities through their Adult Social Care departments and in relation to their area Safeguarding Adults Boards (SABs) and partner organisations. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the survey in relation to personalised social care and its impact on organisations, their staff and service users, and conclude with wider implications and recommendations for further work.

A series of guided interviews were conducted with safeguarding leads from a sample comprising of 115 (76 per cent) of English local authorities during May and June 2016. The sample was randomly picked and balanced to give a fair representation of the different types of councils. The interviews were conducted by a team of five people. All interviewers had in-depth experience of adult safeguarding and were currently practicing independent chairs of SABs. The interviewers followed a prepared schedule consisting of a mixture of open and closed questions. All interviews were held over the phone and averaged one-hour duration.

The results pointed to the impression that the majority of local authorities had completed the first step of introducing MSP, i.e. they had trained their workers and modified their systems. Most local authorities were moving into the next phase of embedding user-focussed work into their practice and culture, and were at various points along that journey. However, most had still to engage partner organisations beyond a mere acceptance of MSP as “a good thing”.

The research has wide ranging implications for organisations and their workers in the field of adult safeguarding based on its findings. Its limitations are that only organisational leaders and managers were interviewed, although reference is extensively made to initiatives that engage service users. The authors acknowledged the possible bias of interviewees when judging the performance of their own service and attempted to moderate their views in the final report.

The report references many practical implications to improve the practice of adult safeguarding in an attempt to make it more person-centred. Examples of good practice are given and recommendations are made to organisations.

It is recognised that there are many people who may be at risk of harm through their environmental, personal, age or disability-related situations. In improving the way that services respond to their needs, they will be made to feel safer and their lives enhanced.

This original research follows up previous research in the preceding year. It is the widest ranging in its coverage of 76 per cent of English local authorities. Its value is that it measures progress towards full implementation of MSP; reports information and views from safeguarding leaders; and makes 20 recommendations to improve the implementation of MSP within local authorities, SABs and their partners.

This paper highlights the importance of user satisfaction in office renovation. A user-focussed renovation approach can enhance user satisfaction in offices and their functional quality while meeting energy performance goals. The purpose of this paper is to investigate users’ needs and the physical and psychological factors affecting user satisfaction, as input to office renovation projects.

The selected articles are collected from Scopus, ScienceDirect and Google Scholar. Searching was limited to the main key terms of office, work environment, and user satisfaction and comfort. The important factors were searched through empirical-based international literature mainly. Based hereupon, a guide will be developed for the analysis and evaluation of user satisfaction in office renovations.

From a comprehensive overview, the findings present ten main factors to increase user satisfaction in office renovation. These are associated with physical and psychological satisfaction and comfort. In addition, the influential factors were categorised into three levels based on needs theories to organise the hierarchy of priorities.

This research adds to the body of knowledge about which factors are important for user satisfaction, based on what previous research has found in that field. This is important to improve the sustainability in use.

User satisfaction is often studied through separate aspects: health and indoor climate vs functionality and productivity. This paper examines overall user satisfaction of workplaces by integrating the perspectives of physical and psychological conditions, and by providing insight into the priority of satisfaction factors.

People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated public, private and voluntary health-care providers to obtain the care they need. Complex health conditions frequently transcend the scope of typical health-care service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore and characterize such unique assemblages of actors and services as “user-defined ecosystems”.

Building on literature on customer ecosystems, this paper introduces the concept of the user-defined ecosystem (UDE). Using an abductive approach, the authors apply the concept in an interpretive, qualitative study of ten families with special needs children.

This study uncovers complex UDEs, where families actively combine a broad range of services. These ecosystems are unique for each family and extend beyond the scope of designed service ecosystems. Thus, the families are forced to assume an active, coordinating role.

This paper shows how to identify ecosystems from the user’s point of view, based on the selected user unit (such as a family) and the focal value-creating function of the ecosystem for the user.

This paper highlights how service providers can support and adapt to UDEs and, thus, contribute to user value and well-being. This can be used to understand users’ perspectives on service and systems in health and social care.

This study develops the concept of the UDE, which represents a customer-focused perspective on actor ecosystems and contrasts it with a provider-focused and a distributed perspective on ecosystems. This study demonstrates the practical usefulness of the conceptualization and provides a foundation for further research on the user’s perspective on ecosystems.

Purpose. To provide an overview of the approach to EIS evaluation taken by the eVALUEd toolkit and relate this to other work in this area. Design/methodology/approach. The eVALUEd toolkit was designed to fill a gap in EIS evaluation in relation to qualitative techniques, user‐focused evaluation and the utilisation of evaluation findings. Findings. The eVALUEd toolkit makes a distinct contribution to EIS evaluation through its focus on people rather than resources or technology, emphasis on qualitative methods and promotion of all aspects of the evaluation cycle. Research limitations/implications. Further work is required in relation to mixed methods of EIS evaluation and case studies would provide greater insight into the ways in which such data can be used in practice. Practical implications. There should be greater consideration given to the use of qualitative methods of EIS evaluation as statistical data alone are rarely sufficient for investigating complex problems and planning and managing services. However, there is a need for further guidance and training in this area. Originality/value. Aimed at library practitioners and researchers and others who provide support with evaluation. Reports on a practical tool and offers a balance to work focused on quantitative evaluation methods.

Merging library traffic from dispersed service points into a combined services desk is not new, and many reasons prompt this move. George Mason University, Virginia’s largest public research institution, combined a total of 10 service desks located in four libraries on three distributed campuses. To consolidate services and reduce costs, the Mason Libraries established a “one-stop” service point in each library. With the goal of “one-stop” service point in each facility, the Mason Libraries recrafted physical spaces, reviewed policies, procedures, and workflows as well as revised staff roles and responsibilities.

This chapter explores why institutions embark on redesigning the traditional library service desk; discusses how changing service needs impact desk space; and addresses the effect on public services personnel. Observations are based on highlights from the evolution of George Mason University Libraries’ goal of a “one-stop” service point in each library to provide more efficient and consistent user-focused interactions and services.

As a manager of one of the facilities, the author provides insights on achieving a “one-stop” service point.

This chapter considers library staff needs, in concert with internal effort to not only refine user services influencing changes, but also revisit policies, procedures, and workflows to align staff roles and responsibilities. Mason Libraries is one of a few university library systems trying to implement single service points in all libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to critically review the literature on design thinking training to elucidate guidelines for best practices of design thinking training interventions.

The literature was reviewed, which outlined several themes that informed a series of recommendations for organizations considering developing design thinking training.

Process-based training, delivery activities and content, skills-based approach, delivery format, support for training and training evaluation were identified as key themes in the literature. These themes highlighted practical recommendations for developing design thinking training interventions. Findings also demonstrate current limitations in the literature.

Research on design thinking training is limited; therefore, recommendations for training should be applied carefully. The limited research points to a fruitful area for future research and development of design thinking training.

This paper suggests that researchers and practitioners should develop face-to-face or hybrid design thinking training interventions that follow the design thinking process and focus on the development of relevant skills, using interactive, user-focused and design visualization activities. Results suggest that adequate support for training should be provided, and outcomes of training should be empirically evaluated.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to review the design thinking training literature and provide general recommendations for both design thinking training development and design thinking research.

This study aims to explore the character and attainment of an effective URL system by expanding the concept of URL normalization, originally connected to machine-reading access of web pages, to form a broader understanding of URL systematization that includes user-focused cognitive and practical elements.

A revised understanding of URL normalization will be used to critically analyzed URLs of main admissions pages from M1 universities, as designated by the Carnegie Foundation.

The study found that very few institutions implemented well-organized systems of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) and redirects and that many included unintelligible and impractical URLs that would hinder the effective use of their websites.

A broader understanding of URL systematization will result in more effective website design. URLs must serve an indexical function pointing to a unique web resource, whatever the URL's format. However, URLs should also consider human usability issues and strive to be simple, short, communicable, intelligible and ultimately useful as part of social interactions. Poorly designed URLs create frustration, if not failure, by being difficult to use, confusing or interminable. An effective URL system should also include redirects to anticipate alternate, meaningful URLs that are different from the canonical path. The framework and recommendations arising from this study are applicable to many website structures.

The expanded understanding of the concept of URL normalization and subsequent evaluation principles can be used to assess the overall coherence and completeness of the website in general, thus improving website usability.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a fourfold semantic similarity that results in more accuracy compared to the existing literature. The change detection in the URL and the recommendation of the source documents is facilitated by means of a framework in which the fourfold semantic similarity is implied. The latest trends in technology emerge with the continuous growth of resources on the collaborative web. This interactive and collaborative web pretense big challenges in recent technologies like cloud and big data.

The enormous growth of resources should be accessed in a more efficient manner, and this requires clustering and classification techniques. The resources on the web are described in a more meaningful manner.

It can be descripted in the form of metadata that is constituted by resource description framework (RDF). Fourfold similarity is proposed compared to three-fold similarity proposed in the existing literature. The fourfold similarity includes the semantic annotation based on the named entity recognition in the user interface, domain-based concept matching and improvised score-based classification of domain-based concept matching based on ontology, sequence-based word sensing algorithm and RDF-based updating of triples. The aggregation of all these similarity measures including the components such as semantic user interface, semantic clustering, and sequence-based classification and semantic recommendation system with RDF updating in change detection.

The existing work suggests that linking resources semantically increases the retrieving and searching ability. Previous literature shows that keywords can be used to retrieve linked information from the article to determine the similarity between the documents using semantic analysis.

These traditional systems also lack in scalability and efficiency issues. The proposed study is to design a model that pulls and prioritizes knowledge-based content from the Hadoop distributed framework. This study also proposes the Hadoop-based pruning system and recommendation system.

The pruning system gives an alert about the dynamic changes in the article (virtual document). The changes in the document are automatically updated in the RDF document. This helps in semantic matching and retrieval of the most relevant source with the virtual document.

The recommendation and detection of changes in the blogs are performed semantically using n-triples and automated data structures. User-focussed and choice-based crawling that is proposed in this system also assists the collaborative filtering. Consecutively collaborative filtering recommends the user focussed source documents. The entire clustering and retrieval system is deployed in multi-node Hadoop in the Amazon AWS environment and graphs are plotted and analyzed.