"Usability + usefulness = trust": an exploratory study of Australian health web sites

Purpose – The aim is to explore users' reactions to health information web sites from the perspective of trust, retrieval of relevant information and ease‐of‐use, and to establish the link between perceived quality, trust, and usability.Design/methodology/approach – An analysis of three Australian health web sites was undertaken. A usability test was conducted on those three web sites resulting in 207 completed user evaluations. The evaluations included both quantitative and qualitative data.Findings – The three investigated health information web sites do not meet the needs of health consumers. More details such as how information is selected to engender greater trust need to be provided. The retrieval of relevant information could be improved through the implementation of functionality such as spell checking and information differentiation. Finally, ensuring web sites are easy to use contributes to the level of trust users have in a web site.Research limitations/implications – This was a relatively smal...

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