Bringing the Field into Focus: User-centered Design of a Patient Expertise Locator.
Managing personal aspects of health is challenging for many patients, particularly those facing a serious condition such as cancer. Finding experienced patients, who can share their knowledge from managing a similar health situation, is of tremendous value. Users of health-related social software form a large base of such knowledge, yet these tools often lack features needed to locate peers with expertise. Informed directly by our field work with breast cancer patients, we designed a patient expertise locator for users of online health communities. Using feedback from two focus groups with breast cancer survivors, we took our design through two iterations. Focus groups concluded that expertise locating features proved useful for extending social software. They guided design enhancements by suggesting granular user control through (1) multiple mechanisms to identify expertise, (2) detailed user profiles to select expertise, and (3) varied collaboration levels. Our user-centered approach links field work to design through close collaboration with patients. By illustrating trade-offs made when sharing sensitive health information, our findings inform the incorporation of expertise locating features into social software for patients.
Division of Biomedical & Health Informatics University of Washington Seattle, WA, USA.
Andrea
A
Civan-Hartzler
David W
DW
McDonald
Chris
C
Powell
Meredith M
MM
Skeels
Marlee
M
Mukai
Wanda
W
Pratt
J Med Internet Res. 2008 May 27;10(3):e15
18504244
AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2007 Oct 11;:140-4
18693814
Patient Educ Couns. 2008 Mar;70(3):315-37
18191527
GROUP ACM SIGCHI Int Conf Support Group Work. 2009;2009:291-300
20953244
J Med Internet Res. 2005 Jul 01;7(3):e32
15998623