title: Exploring user navigation during online health information seeking.
abstract: Understanding online user behavior is essential for designing user-friendly consumer health Web sites. Transaction log analysis (TLA) provides a way to extract aggregate data about online behavior. This paper describes prevalent user navigation trends using TLA methods at ClinicalTrials.gov. Preliminary results suggest that users typically access low-level pages directly from Web-based search engines and consumer health sites/portals. A pilot user study is presented to illustrate a complementary research method that might be integrated with TLA to provide a multidimensional view of online health information-seeking behavior. Implications of the observed navigation behavior on the design of consumer health Web sites from TLA and users studies are discussed.
authors.affiliation: Lister Hill Center, National Library of Medicine, NIH, DHHS, Bethesda, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Laurel
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Graham
authors.forename: Tony
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tse
authors.forename: Alla
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Keselman
mesh_terms: D001519:Behavior; D002986:Clinical Trials as Topic; D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods; D019992:Databases as Topic / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D007255:Information Services; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D020407:Internet; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009862:Online Systems / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D010865:Pilot Projects