Insights
Practical guides, not theory
Notes from real research, usability testing, and PPIE projects - written for teams who need to make better decisions about products, services, and patient involvement.
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Quick definitions for three terms that come up throughout the guides below.
What is PPIE?
What PPIE and PPI mean, the difference between them, and how patient and public involvement actually works in NHS services and research.
Read the guideWhat is usability testing?
What a session looks like, how many participants you need, what it tells you that analytics cannot, and when it is worth the money.
Read the guideWhat is participatory research?
Co-production, action research, CBPR and peer research: what separates them, and what "with, not on" means in practice.
Read the guideNo insights match this filter yet.
PPIE Examples: What Good Evidence Looks Like to Reviewers
Most teams know PPIE needs to change something. Fewer have seen what that looks like written down, next to the version that does not work. Five checkpoints, weak versus good, and the pattern behind both.
What Is a Diary Study?
Ask someone how their week went and you get the highlights. Ask them to log it as it happens and you get the real shape of it. How diary studies work, what breaks them, and when they beat an interview.
How to Write the PPIE Section of an NIHR Application
Reviewers are reading for one thing: what did involvement actually change? What the section must contain, the phrases that cost marks, and what to write when your involvement so far is thin.
What Does PPIE Cost? Real Numbers for Budgeting
Real figures from a single advisory panel to a full programme, what sits inside each one, and why the visible cost of involvement is usually the smaller half.
How to Run a UX Audit: The Method We Actually Use
Scope, sweep, severity, report. The four-stage method behind a paid audit, written so you can run one yourself, and an honest account of what you will still miss.
What Is a UX Audit? What's Involved and Why It Matters
"Can someone just look at this and tell us what's wrong with it?" is what a UX audit answers. What's involved, why teams run them, and where their limits are.
How Fast Can You Actually Recruit Research Participants?
Recruitment, not the study itself, is where most research timelines slip. Where the time actually goes, why demand to take part isn't the same as supply of the right people, and what genuinely speeds things up.
How to Recruit a Genuinely Diverse Research Panel
Diverse panels take more than a wider net. What it actually takes to recruit lived experience and underserved communities into research, online and offline.
What Is a User Interview?
User interviews are the most widely used qualitative research method and among the most frequently run badly. Here's how they work, where they beat surveys and focus groups, and when to use something else.
What Is Contextual Inquiry?
People aren't always reliable narrators of their own behaviour. Contextual inquiry means going to where the work happens and watching it unfold, not asking someone to describe it afterwards.
Qualitative vs Quantitative Research: Which Do You Need?
Numbers tell you what's happening and how often. Conversations tell you why. A practical guide to choosing the right approach, and when to use both together.
UX Audit vs Usability Testing: What's the Difference?
Both produce a report and a list of findings, but the evidence behind them is different. How expert review and real-user testing differ, and how to use both together.
How Many Usability Testing Participants Do You Actually Need?
"Five users" is a genuinely useful rule of thumb, and routinely misapplied. Here's where it holds up, where it breaks down, and how we work out the right number for a study.
Budgeting for PPIE in NIHR Grant Applications
PPIE budgets get challenged by reviewers more often than the activity itself does. A practical breakdown of what to cost in, realistic figures by study size, and how to present the figure so it holds up.
PPIE vs Patient Engagement vs Patient Experience
These three terms get used interchangeably, but they mean different things and get evidenced in different ways. Here's how to tell them apart and why getting it right matters to funders and reviewers.
Why AI personas can't replace real user research
AI tools can generate a persona in seconds. They can't tell you what your actual users think, want, or struggle with. Here's where synthetic research helps, where it breaks down, and what a hybrid approach looks like in practice.
Written from the field, not a content calendar
Everything here comes out of work we have actually done - sessions we have run, findings we have written up, questions clients have asked us more than once. If a guide makes a claim, it is because we have seen it play out in a real project.
That includes being honest about where new tools genuinely help, and where they do not. Our view on AI in research, for example, comes from testing AI products with real participants - not from speculation.
Talk to us about your projectWe fully recognise the effort your team invested in recruitment, moderation, and analysis, and we genuinely appreciate the quality of the discussions and reporting.
- Usability problems in an insulin device surfaced before manufacturing locked anything in, with human factors evidence supporting the regulatory submission.
- An NHS patient portal team got a prioritised, evidenced list of adoption barriers, and the highest-leverage fix wasn't the one they expected.
- Patient involvement changed a trial's primary endpoint before the protocol was finalised, cited by the ethics committee as a model for evidencing PPIE.
Trusted PPI and PPIE delivery partner to the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Accelerated Surgical Care.
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