The role of user expectations in design and development of personalised health information websites and portals

Health consumers are becoming increasingly reliant on health information websites and portals to provide basic health information and yet, these websites are not meeting the expectations of most health consumers. Personalisation is one area which could improve the health consumers experience; however, health consumers remain dissatisfied, reportedly because their expectations towards personalised health information websites and portals are not met. The research undertaken for this thesis investigated the role of user expectations in the design and development of health information websites and portals. It identified and addressed gaps in the theoretical and practical knowledge related to the notion of user expectations, and in particular, their role and operationalisation in the design and development of personalised health information websites and portals. An extensive literature analysis and empirical study that involved systems designers, developers and health information consumers confirmed the importance of the chosen topic. During this research a number of factors, or determinants of user expectations, that influence the formation of user expectations, were identified. Given the e-health context of the study, this research emphasised determinants of user expectations, such as personal factors; which are defined as individual user characteristics that affect user expectations. The identified personal factors, namely personal experiences, values, beliefs, intentions and affective components were conceptualised in a form of a theoretical Framework. This theoretical Framework was used as a foundation for the development of a structured approach to the extraction of user expectations using think-aloud method in combination with interviews and observations. This approach was empirically tested and documented in a form of Guidelines for systems designers and developers to help them extract user expectations towards personalised health information websites and portals. The conducted research draws attention to the problem of the neglect of user expectations and their role in the design and development of online systems, namely personalised health websites. This study sheds the light on user expectations, provides significant contributions to both theory and practice and identifies directions for the future research in the e-health domain. The central contribution of this study is that it offers a structured, well-defined and theoretically based approach to the extraction and formalisation of user expectations towards personalised health information websites and portals. Furthermore, this structured approach that can be incorporated into systems design and development practices. A theoretical Framework that incorporates a list of personal factors that influence the formation of user expectations is an important contribution to theory. Given the lack of empirical research of the problem of user expectations, namely what personal factors influence the formation of user expectations, it is believed that this contribution provides a valuable insight in the explored problem and extends the body of knowledge in the domain relating to user expectations. The developed set of Guidelines on how to extract user expectations towards personalised health websites is the major contribution to practice. The Guidelines represent a structured, formalised approach to the extraction of user expectations that can be subsequently incorporated into online systems design and development practices in the e-health domain.