Improving the design of health information websites: A study of users' expectations

The design of health information websites is increasingly important in this digital age when patients from various socioeconomic and literacy backgrounds use online resources to assess risk for various health conditions and to decide on treatment regimens. The current study had two goals: understanding users' general design expectations in websites and ascertaining how to build patient-centric health information websites. This study involved the construction of a new online instrument for polling participants' (N=200) attitudes and beliefs about website design characteristics, and participants' "stage of change" for using the computer and the Internet to access health information. Descriptive statistics and frequency distributions, highlighting respondents' utililization and expectations for Web-based health information, were reported. Almost two-thirds of the participants reported confidence in their ability to use computers to access online healthcare information. Participants' priorities for website design characteristics were listed, in order of importance. Health educators, human factor experts, and health informatics professionals may use the preliminary findings in this study to work with web designers to ensure that interactive, engaging multimodal websites are created that effectively provide health information.