Concept Testing Toward a Patient-Validated Information Architecture: Prototype Development of Healthtalk Norway

摘要

A Norwegian research group is adopting the Database of Individual Patient's Experience of Illness (DIPEx) international methodology standards for collecting qualitative research into people's health experiences and disseminating it on a web site. We are in the concept phase of developing the web site, and decided to build a topical ambiguous taxonomy together with a more clinically influenced taxonomy with top-level labels "Health and lifestyle" and "Illness" for the information architecture of the web site. In this paper, we report from usability testing of the top-level label of the topical taxonomy. We ran qualitative and quantitative A/B tests on wireframe concept sketches. The two top-level labels were a generic variant, "Topic", tested against the control variant, "Everyday life". Both qualitative and quantitative tests indicate better results for "Everyday life" as the top-level label for the topical ambiguous taxonomy of the web site. While not fully conclusive, the results provide reasonable confidence in the more descriptive label "Everyday life" at this early stage. It is preferable in that it both seems to create a more coherent set of expectations amongst the users, and more closely matches the content of the web site. The concept test is therefore deemed a useful first step in a rigorous testing program to ensure that the development process is informed by a patient-validated information architecture.