Designing Medical Research Web Sites

Abstract

This chapter discusses the design of Web sites to be used as the basis of medical research. It is broken down into three sections: Part 1 discusses the various issues that have to be addressed in the design of a Web site that will be used to assess some intervention based on the Web site. Part 2 discusses the design of such a Web site and the development of a tool to facilitate this process. Part 3 presents the results of preliminary usability analysis for the tool to assist medical researchers in constructing Web sites that can meet the needs and requirements of medical intervention studies. The results of the preliminary interviews, prototype walkthroughs, and preliminary usability studies are presented laying the groundwork for future development and more formal usability studies.