Milios Athena, McGrath Patrick, Baillie Hannah
Department of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada.
Centre for Research in Family Health, IWK Health Centre, Halifax, NS, Canada.
JMIR Form Res. 2020 Feb 12;4(2):e14496. doi: 10.2196/14496.
Informal caregivers are family members or close friends who provide unpaid help to individuals with acute or chronic health conditions so that they can manage daily life tasks. The greatest source of health information is the internet for meeting the needs of caregivers. However, information on the internet may not be scientifically valid, it may be written in language that is difficult to read, and is often in very large doses. 90Second Caregiver is a health letter whose aim is to disseminate knowledge to caregivers in a user-friendly, weekly format, in order to improve their wellbeing.
The main objective was to test a sample of 90Second Caregiver health letters in order to assess their usability and to optimize the design and content of the health letters.
Usability research themes were assessed using semi-structured phone interviews, incorporating the Think Aloud method with retrospective questioning.
Usability was assessed in the context of five main themes: understandability and learnability, completeness, relevance, and quality and credibility of the health letter content, as well as design and format. Caregivers generally provided positive feedback regarding the usability of the letters. The usability feedback was used to refine 90Second Caregiver in order to improve the design and content of the series. Based on the results of this study, it may be of maximum benefit to target the series towards individuals who are new to caregiving or part-time caregivers, given that these caregivers of the sample found the letters more useful and relevant and had the most positive usability experiences.
The findings assisted in the improvement of the 90Second Caregiver template, which will be used to create future health letters and refine the letters that have already been created. The findings have implications for who the 90Second Caregiver series should be targeting (ie, newer or part-time caregivers) in order to be maximally impactful in improving mental health and wellbeing-related outcomes for caregivers, such as self-efficacy and caregiving knowledge. The results of this study may be generalizable to the examination of other electronic health information formats, making them valuable to future researchers testing the usability of health information products. In addition, the methods used in this study are useful for usability hypothesis generation. Lastly, our 90Second delivery approach can generate information useful for a set of similar products (eg, weekly health letters targeted towards other conditions/populations).
非正式照护者是指为患有急性或慢性健康问题的个人提供无偿帮助，使其能够完成日常生活任务的家庭成员或亲密朋友。满足照护者需求的最大健康信息来源是互联网。然而，互联网上的信息可能在科学上并不有效，可能使用难以理解的语言编写，而且信息量往往非常大。《90秒照护者》是一份健康通讯，旨在以用户友好的每周形式向照护者传播知识，以改善他们的健康状况。
主要目的是测试一份《90秒照护者》健康通讯样本，以评估其可用性，并优化健康通讯的设计和内容。
使用半结构化电话访谈评估可用性研究主题，结合出声思考法和回顾性提问。
在五个主要主题的背景下评估了可用性：可理解性和可学习性、完整性、相关性、健康通讯内容的质量和可信度，以及设计和格式。照护者通常对通讯的可用性给予积极反馈。可用性反馈被用于完善《90秒照护者》，以改进该系列的设计和内容。根据本研究的结果，鉴于样本中的这些照护者发现这些通讯更有用、更相关，并且具有最积极的可用性体验，将该系列针对新照护者或兼职照护者可能会带来最大益处。
研究结果有助于改进《90秒照护者》模板，该模板将用于创建未来的健康通讯，并完善已创建的通讯。研究结果对于《90秒照护者》系列应以谁为目标受众（即新照护者或兼职照护者）具有启示意义，以便在改善照护者的心理健康和与健康相关的结果（如自我效能感和照护知识）方面产生最大影响。本研究的结果可能适用于其他电子健康信息格式的研究，使其对未来测试健康信息产品可用性的研究人员具有价值。此外，本研究中使用的方法有助于生成可用性假设。最后，我们的90秒传递方法可以生成对一组类似产品（如针对其他疾病/人群的每周健康通讯）有用的信息。
