1. Master Medical Informatics Biomedical Research and evaluation Methodology Maarten Buiter Khalid Bohoudi Mark de Groot Evelyn Lai Usability evaluation of Emedicine The continually updated clinical Reference

2. Introduction About Emedicine Usability evaluation techniques Heuristic evaluation Task Analysis Research team Outcomes Conclusion and recommendation

3. About Emedicine Website Founded in 1996 Targets professionals and institutions 10.000 contributors, 7.000 articles in 59 specialties and 30.000 multimedia files Evidence-based content, thoroughly reviewed before put online Also founded www.emedicinehealth.com for consumerswww.emedicinehealth.com Subscribe to Health On the Net Foundation codes (HONcodes)

4. Why this Usability Evaluation? Decreasing number of registered users Therefore, decreased advertorial revenue, and less paying institutional customers Usability evaluation part of parallel two-fold rescue plan (The other team reviews the content and the user’s information needs)

5. Usability Evaluation Test team General impression and review of self-made “Good website” requirements Nielsen 10 item heuristic evaluation Task Analysis (3 tasks)

6. General impression homepage Inefficient use of screen space Inconsistent link style Dead links Where am I? (no sitemap) Unclear choice of categories Not customizable Search box?

7. Usability evaluation – Heuristics (Jacob Nielsen) Visibility of system status Match between real world and system User control and freedom Consistency and Standards Error prevention Recognition rather than recall Flexibility and efficiency of use Aesthetic and minimalist design Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors Help and documentation

8. Visibility of System Status (01/10) “What is it doing?” taken care of by browser progress indicator Breadcrumb navigation: Inconsistent use, and not working for some pages Visited pages not recognizable because of single color links Overall site performance: very good.

9. Match between system and real world (02/10) System uses daily user’s language Names of links are clear When used, button texts are clear (Search, Back, Next, Top) Some unclear abbreviations (CME, CE (probably medical exams))

10. User control and freedom (03/10) Not very applicable to Emedicine Browser back button works fine However, Breadcrumb navigation hampers back and redo functionality

11. Consistency and Standards (04/10) When away from homepage and category listings, reference pages look similar Emedicine follows web standards to large extend Clinical information printer- friendly Except for: Single color links Non-resizable text on homepage Account information on the left side (and not functional)

12. Error prevention (05/10) When registering for account, form checks for errors Broken links offer no recovery (no custom HTTP-404 error pages)

13. Recognition rather than recall (06/10) The system does not use icons or images to indicate certain areas. Use of images has been minimized, and when imaged are used, relation with item is not clear:

14. Flexibility and efficiency of use (07/10) The site offers no accelerators or hotkeys

15. Aesthetic and minimalist design (08/10) Only homepage shows clear “design” make-up (with corresponding usability problems) Clinical pages are lean, text-only with images at the end Pages do contain commercial information (adds), but all are domain related

16. Help users recognize, diagnose and recover from errors (09/10) Does not really apply to this site However, bad http-404 pages are not advisable for error recovery Search box does offer alternative suggestions, like:

17. Help and Documentation (10/10) Hardly needed for this simple website, therefore not available

18. Task Analysis We have individually analyzed three different tasks: Using Emedicine categories, find medication information for therapy of schizophrenic patients Create an account needed to login to Emedicine Use the search box to find (in Emedicine) radiology images of acute pancreatitis