User research about Event Management for Health Education England

We collaborated with Health Education England (HEE) on a user research project to better understand the ways in which events are managed across the organisation. 

There are multiple approaches to event management in practice across HEE. And the localised nature of decision making has resulted in pockets of good (and less good) practice that have developed over time. 

It was also clear that a wide array of digital tools were being used to facilitate this process. 

The HEE team wanted to better understand the range of user needs and behaviours associated with event management, to inform a possible transition to a more unified national approach. 

We conducted twenty 1-2-1 interviews with stakeholders and events organisers as part of this research. 

The work benefitted from a well defined participant list from the outset of the project, thanks to previous internal communications in HEE. But the impact of COVID-19 meant that we had to adapt our recruitment strategies. 

Despite this, we carried out a thorough piece of remote research, which revealed a multitude of approaches to events management across HEE. 

Some event platforms were widely used across the organisation, whilst people also had a preference for using non specialist events tools such as the email and calendar functionality in Microsoft Outlook.  

We presented our work, including 44 prioritised user needs, to HEE stakeholders. The findings are now being used by HEE as they seek to streamline the events management process across the organisation.