Evaluating how users interact with NHS Direct Online

Evaluating the NHS Direct Online website presents some challenges and therefore a number of evaluation methods and approaches are utilized by NHS Direct. This paper presents one approach, web log analysis, to explore how users interact with the NHS Direct Online website. Focusing on one health topic, MRSA for one-day's website visits, proved informative and highlighted a number of interesting questions about the user interaction with the MRSA topic and about navigation on the website. The findings show 242 visits to the Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) topic, the PDF or print pages were visited 9 times on the day, and therefore, it may be assumed that the MRSA topic was viewed in an apparently logical sequence. For the remaining visits to the website, some visits achieved quite good coverage of the MRSA topic, however, none of the visits followed any of the logical sequences hypothesized for viewing health information content.