A paper presented at PACIS 2016 (Chiayi, Taiwan) on 30 June 2016. Authors: Patrick Pang, Shanton Chang, Karin Verspoor, and Jon Pearce

1. Innovation in Designing Health
Information Websites
Patrick Cheong-Iao Pang 1,3, Shanton Chang 1, Karin Verspoor 1,2, Jon Pearce 1
1. Department of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Australia
2. Health and Biomedical Informatics Centre, The University of Melbourne, Australia
3. NICTA Victoria Research Lab, Australia

2. Image courtesy of Flickr @foshydog | CC BY-NC-ND

8. Some Observations
 Complicated;
 Not fully utilise the information in each
website.
 Could users have a different (better) way to
find information?

9. Patrick Cheong-Iao Pang, Shanton Chang, Jon Pearce and Karin Verspoor. (2014). Online
health information seeking behaviour: Understanding different search approaches.
Proceedings of the 18th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS 2014).
Different Search Approaches
Pang, Chang, Pearce and Verspoor. 2014. Online health information seeking behaviour: Understanding different search approaches.
Proceedings of the 18th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS 2014).

10. Our Solution
 Better Health Explorer (BHX)
 Aims to provide a web-based environment to
explore health information

11. Demo

12. Goals
 Evaluate how users respond in both focused
and exploratory scenarios;
 Summarise design strategies for building
effective health websites.

13. Research Design
 We tested with two websites:
Better Health Explorer (BHX) Better Health Channel (baseline)

14. Research Design
 For each website, participants were required
to evaluate in:
 Focused search scenario;
 Exploratory search scenario.
 Total 4 tasks for each participant.

15. Data Collection
 5-point Likert Scale Survey
 Short Interview

16. Participants
 31 participants
 Male: 15 Female: 16
 Average age: 34
 Range: 20 - 72
 Occupations:
 Student: 19 Staff: 17 Others: 2

17. Results: Focused Search
Item Baseline
Mean
BHX
Mean
p-
value
Effect
Size
Presented Diverse
Information
3.3 4.0 0.003 0.373
Presented Serendipitous
Topics
2.8 3.8 0.000 0.495
Enjoyment 3.0 3.9 0.000 0.494
Learnt New Knowledge 3.7 4.3 0.012 0.318
Engagement 3.1 3.9 0.002 0.399
Would Use Again 3.7 4.0 0.025 0.288
All p<0.05

18. Results: Exploratory Search
Item Baseline
Mean
BHX
Mean
p-
value
Effect
Size
Presented Diverse
Information
3.4 4.4 0.003 0.374
Presented Serendipitous
Topics
3.3 4.4 0.001 0.408
Enjoyment 3.2 4.1 0.015 0.309
Learnt New Knowledge 3.7 4.3 0.016 0.302
Engagement 3.2 4.0 0.002 0.394
Would Use Again 3.5 4.0 0.008 0.341
All p<0.05

19. Correlations
Item 1 Item 2 Correlation
value
p-value
Learnt New Knowledge Presented Serendipitous
Topics
0.725 0.000*
Task Success Easy to Tell the System
What Is Needed
0.470 0.006*
Engagement Presented Diverse
Information
0.074 0.097
Usefulness Presented Diverse
Information
0.483 0.069
* p<0.05

20. Lessons Learnt
1. Improving the communication of health
information needs;
2. More diverse information;
3. Introducing serendipity.

21. Improving the Communication of Health
Information Needs
 Correlation:
Learnt New Knowledge <> Easy to Tell the
System What Is Needed
 “In another one (baseline) I need to look for
topics. This one (BHX) showed me topics. So
it’s better.”

22. Improving the Communication of Health
Information Needs
 Keyword search is the most common way to
input the health information needs;
 Good for focused search, but NOT for
exploratory search;
 Need to have new methods for passing health
information needs.

23. More Diverse Information
 “By giving you choices rather than just
coming up with the top things, I think it
makes (the system) more interesting to use.”
 Correlated with Engagement and Usefulness.

24. More Diverse Information

25. Introducing Serendipity
 “Giving me different options that I did not
consider.”
 “I never thought about this and then (it
showed up). Ah! This is good.”
 Correlated with Learning New Knowledge.

26. Introducing Serendipity

27. Summary
 Focused vs. Exploratory Search in health;
 Better Health Explorer is seemed outstanding
in supporting health information seeking;

28. Summary
 3 design strategies for effective health
websites:
1. Improving the communication of health
information needs;
2. More diverse information;
3. Introducing serendipity.

29. mail@patrickpang.net @pangpatrick
Acknowledgements: