JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Youth with Special Health Care Needs (YSHCN) have chronic physical, developmental, behavioral, or emotional conditions that require health care and other services beyond typical utilization. Health care transitions from pediatric to adult care is a priority area for YSHCN and their care providers. The Texas Transition Toolkit (T3) supports medical care providers by providing a “one-stop-shop” to research literature on transition care, a catalog of relevant tools for providers to assess their organization or the YSHCN and families they work with, and guides for developing a transition program in their medical home.

Objective:

The objective of this study was to evaluate the usability and functionality of the T3 among end users (health care providers working with YSHCN and their families).

Methods:

We utilized a mixed-methods process combining the concurrent think aloud (CTA) method, the Website Evaluation Questionnaire (WEQ), a task performance analysis, and Van Den Haak et als’ problem relevance metric to assess end-users’ experiences with the T3. Results. The overall satisfaction score for the T3 was 80.7%. The T3 scored highest in relevance (91.3%), then comprehension and layout (both 84.6%). Participants reported lower satisfaction with search (75.3%) and navigation dimensions (ease of use=75.7%; hyperlinks=78%; and structure=79%), a relatively high number of search and navigation related problems (n=21, or 67.75% of the total problems detected), and low tasks completion for tasks involving finding tools (70%), which requires searching and navigation.

Results:

The overall satisfaction score for the T3 was 80.7%. The T3 scored highest in relevance (91.3%), then comprehension and layout (both 84.6%). Participants reported lower satisfaction with search (75.3%) and navigation dimensions (ease of use=75.7%; hyperlinks=78%; and structure=79%), a relatively high number of search and navigation related problems (n=21, or 67.75% of the total problems detected), and low tasks completion for tasks involving finding tools (70%), which requires searching and navigation.

Conclusions:

While the T3 was well-received by end users, our analyses identified areas of concern regarding the application. End-users reported the most difficulty in two areas of functionality and usability: inefficient search function and navigation characteristics. This was reflected in both the CTA trial and the WEQ, and supported by the task performance and relevance analyses. The problems identified around search and navigation functionality were also assessed as ‘relevant’. Each of these areas of analyses triangulate on search and navigation issues, suggesting a robustness of results. Results from the usability trial provided a road map for optimizing the T3, and highlighted the importance of evaluating eHealth technologies with end users.