Development of an Online Contraceptive Decision Aid for College Women

Lack of knowledge in highly efficient contraceptive methods led to low rates of adoption and misuse of these methods by young women. The existing online tools for contraceptive decisions have flaws. To address this critical need, we developed a prototype online contraception decision aid for college women. For this purpose, we conducted a focus group interview for needs assessment. We designed a scoring system to provide accurate and customized recommendations based on a user's preferences. We implemented the tool with specific functions to collect users' needs and preferences in selecting specific contraceptive methods, to present the customized recommendations, to provide side-by-side comparison of all contraceptive methods, and to recommend additional resources. Preliminary data seem to indicate positive evaluations of the tool. Future work is required to examine the generalizability of the findings and to have full implementations of the tool for real world use.