Is it findable? Is it accessible? Is it usable, useful, and valuable? The user experience is a rising concern among those who provide any type of interactive platform, and especially when it comes to H2020 programs like NFFA-Europe that put the easy access argument in the center of their offer.

Fred Brouwer, from the Advanced Research Center for Nanolithography (ARCNL), in Amsterdam, was one of the first users to access the NFFA network of facilities. Through the transnational access provided by NFFA, he went from The Netherlands to Switzerland. We asked him about its experience with NFFA-Europe.

Hello Fred! First, have you ever worked with an H2020 project like NFFA-Europe before this cooperation?

No, this cooperation with NFFA was our first experience with the H2020 programme but it’s been compelling enough to encourage further contacts with European projects in the future!

How did you hear about NFFA-Europe? What did you expect from NFFA-Europe before using our platform? What answer did NFFA-Europe give to your challenge?

The first time I heard about NFFA-Europe is when a beamline scientist told me about it; I then very quickly submitted an application via your website. We needed to perform experiments at advanced nanofabrication techniques operating at synchrotron facilities in combination with other characterization techniques, and through NFFA we had a rather unique possibility to get complementary access to multiple installations to carry out our project. Our proposal was about extreme ultraviolet induced chemical reactions in photoresists and model systems, and in the end we accessed the Paul Scherrer Institut, in Switzerland. It provided us with advanced techniques that greatly helped our research.

How did it go? What was the main advantage, in your opinion, that NFFA-Europe provided you?

Everything worked perfectly fine in PSI, mainly because the entire process was facilitated by the opportunity given by NFFA to apply for combined and coordinated access to different installations through a single entry point. In our experience, this has been much more efficient than applying independently for beam time and activating parallel collaborations for each step of our proposal.

How did you work with PSI? Have you developed a sustainable relation with the facilitie(s) you’ve been granted an access to?

We first visited the Paul Scherrer Institut facilities with a team of students and co-workers, it was really interesting. In the end we definitely made new contacts, during the work related to our application obviously, but also outside of the specific facility that we had access to, and I think we established a hopefully lasting relationship with the people we met there.