Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine, Parker, CO, United States.
Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
J Med Internet Res. 2021 Dec 21;23(12):e27750. doi: 10.2196/27750.
Health care organizations are tasked with providing web-based health resources and information. Usability refers to the ease of user experience on a website. In this study, we conducted a usability analysis of academic medical centers in the United States, which, to the best of our knowledge, has not been previously carried out.
The primary aims of the study were to the following: (1) adapt a preexisting usability scoring methodology to academic medical centers; (2) apply and test this methodology on a sample set of academic medical center websites; and (3) make recommendations from these results on potential areas of improvements for our sample of academic medical center websites.
All website usability testing took place from June 1, 2020, to December 15, 2020. We replicated a methodology developed in previous literature and applied it to academic medical centers. Our sample included 73 US academic medical centers. Usability was split into four broad categories: accessibility (the ability of those with low levels of computer literacy to access and navigate the hospital's website); marketing (the ability of websites to be found through search engines and the relevance of descriptions to the links provided); content quality (grammar, frequency of information updates, material relevancy, and readability); and technology (download speed, quality of the programming code, and website infrastructure). Using these tools, we scored each website in each category. The composite of key factors in each category contributed to an overall "general usability" score for each website. An overall score was then calculated by applying a weighted percentage across all factors and was used for the final "overall usability" ranking.
The category with the highest average score was technology, with a 0.82 (SD 0.068, SE 0.008). The lowest-performing category was content quality, with an average of 0.22 (SD 0.069, SE 0.008). As these numbers reflect weighted percentages as an integer, the higher the score, the greater the overall usability in that category.
Our data suggest that technology, on average, was the highest-scored variable among academic medical center websites. Because website functionality is essential to a user's experience, it is justified that academic medical centers invest in optimal website performance. The overall lowest-scored variable was content quality. A potential reason for this may be that academic medical center websites are usually larger in size, making it difficult to monitor the increased quantity of content. An easy way to improve this variable is to conduct more frequent website audits to assess readability, grammar, and relevance. Marketing is another area in which these organizations have potential for improvement. Our recommendation is that organizations utilize search engine optimization techniques to improve their online visibility and discoverability.
医疗保健组织的任务是提供基于网络的健康资源和信息。可用性是指用户在网站上的使用体验的难易程度。在这项研究中，我们对美国的学术医疗中心进行了可用性分析，据我们所知，这在以前尚未进行过。
本研究的主要目的如下：（1）将现有的可用性评分方法应用于学术医疗中心；（2）将此方法应用于一组学术医疗中心网站进行测试；（3）根据这些结果，为我们的学术医疗中心网站样本提出潜在的改进建议。
所有网站可用性测试均在 2020 年 6 月 1 日至 2020 年 12 月 15 日之间进行。我们复制了先前文献中开发的方法，并将其应用于学术医疗中心。我们的样本包括 73 家美国学术医疗中心。可用性分为四个广泛的类别：可访问性（计算机素养水平较低的人访问和浏览医院网站的能力）；营销（网站通过搜索引擎被发现的能力和描述与提供的链接的相关性）；内容质量（语法、信息更新频率、材料相关性和可读性）；技术（下载速度、编程代码质量和网站基础设施）。使用这些工具，我们对每个类别的每个网站进行了评分。每个类别的关键因素的组合为每个网站的整体“一般可用性”评分做出了贡献。然后通过对所有因素应用加权百分比来计算总体得分，并用于最终的“总体可用性”排名。
得分最高的类别是技术，平均得分为 0.82（SD 0.068，SE 0.008）。表现最差的类别是内容质量，平均得分为 0.22（SD 0.069，SE 0.008）。由于这些数字反映了作为整数的加权百分比，得分越高，该类别整体的可用性就越高。
我们的数据表明，在学术医疗中心网站中，技术平均是得分最高的变量。因为网站功能对于用户体验至关重要，所以学术医疗中心投资于最佳网站性能是合理的。得分最低的变量是内容质量。造成这种情况的一个潜在原因可能是学术医疗中心网站通常规模较大，难以监控增加的内容数量。提高这个变量的一个简单方法是进行更频繁的网站审计，以评估可读性、语法和相关性。营销也是这些组织有潜力改进的另一个领域。我们的建议是，组织利用搜索引擎优化技术来提高其在线可见性和可发现性。
