TY - GEN
T1 - Designing consumer health information systems
T2 - 6th International Conference on Foundations of Augmented Cognition, FAC 2011, Held as Part of HCI International 2011
AU - Zhang, Yan
AU - Fu, Wai Tat
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments. The authors acknowledge the support of the Research Grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Austin.
Funding Information:
The authors acknowledge the support of the Research Grant from the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Texas at Austin.
PY - 2011
Y1 - 2011
N2 - Searching for health information has become a prevalent activity on the web. The information found online has a significant impact on people's decisions on whether to seek medical care and what treatments to undergo. However, existing studies consistently suggest that general consumers have various difficulties in formulating search queries using existing search engines and the queries were often not effective in retrieving personal- and situational-relevant information. Understanding users' information needs is a gateway to designing effective information retrieval (IR) systems. In this study, we examined the types of information requested by users, the characteristics of consumers' expressions of their information needs, and their expectations for results by analyzing the questions that general users posted on Yahoo! Answers, a popular social Q&A site. Based on the results, we proposed design recommendations for facilitating users' ability to articulate their health information needs and recommendations for the presentation of information in health-related IR systems.
AB - Searching for health information has become a prevalent activity on the web. The information found online has a significant impact on people's decisions on whether to seek medical care and what treatments to undergo. However, existing studies consistently suggest that general consumers have various difficulties in formulating search queries using existing search engines and the queries were often not effective in retrieving personal- and situational-relevant information. Understanding users' information needs is a gateway to designing effective information retrieval (IR) systems. In this study, we examined the types of information requested by users, the characteristics of consumers' expressions of their information needs, and their expectations for results by analyzing the questions that general users posted on Yahoo! Answers, a popular social Q&A site. Based on the results, we proposed design recommendations for facilitating users' ability to articulate their health information needs and recommendations for the presentation of information in health-related IR systems.
KW - Consumer health informatics
KW - health information searching
KW - information retrieval
KW - social Q&A
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=79960309459&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=79960309459&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-642-21852-1_62
DO - 10.1007/978-3-642-21852-1_62
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:79960309459
SN - 9783642218514
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 536
EP - 545
BT - Foundations of Augmented Cognition
Y2 - 9 July 2011 through 14 July 2011
ER -