Innovation in designing health information websites: Results from a quantitative study

A wealth of health information exists on the Internet, but successfully finding that information is not easy. One of the issues causing this is the lack of tools for exploring information and assisting in navigation within health websites. As a result, relevant information cannot be easily discovered. We hope to rectify this issue from the design perspective. Based on previous work, we have created a prototype website called Better Health Explorer to better support such information seeking behaviours. This paper reports on a quantitative study evaluating this prototype. The results demonstrate several improvements in health information seeking supported by the tool. Furthermore, we have identified three general design characteristics that should to be considered when designing consumer health websites. These findings have design implications for health information seeking applications, as well as identifying directions for further research.