A Concise and Practical Framework for the Development and Usability Evaluation of Patient Information Websites

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• User-Centered Design
• Web Development

Background:

• The comprehensive Website Developmental Model for the Healthcare Consumer (WDMHC) framework, while effective, is often too extensive for practical application.
• This study adapted a subset of the WDMHC framework to develop and evaluate a website specifically for childhood cancer survivors (CCS).

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if a limited WDMHC subset can yield a high-quality, low-usability-problem website for a specific patient group.
• To assess the feasibility of applying a streamlined WDMHC approach in healthcare web development.

Main Methods:

• A six-step process based on the WDMHC was employed, including information needs analysis, prototyping, and focus groups.
• Usability was evaluated through heuristic evaluation (HE) by expert reviewers and think-aloud analysis (TA) by end-users.
• Nielsen heuristics were used for HE, and end-users completed predefined scenarios during TA.

Main Results:

• Heuristic evaluation identified 29 unique usability issues, while think-aloud analysis revealed 11 unique problems.
• Cosmetic design flaws were noted in 4 HE-identified issues, and 2 TA-identified problems related to website content.
• The concurrent HE and TA processes provided a comprehensive usability assessment of the website prototype.

Conclusions:

• The adapted WDMHC subset successfully produced a website meeting end-user expectations with minimal usability issues.
• This study demonstrates a practical and effective framework for developing highly usable healthcare websites for targeted medical populations.
• The findings support the use of a simplified WDMHC approach for efficient and effective healthcare website development.