JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Many healthcare organizations are now tasked with providing web-based health resources and information. Usability refers to the ease of user experience on a website. Our objective was to adapt pre-existing usability scoring systems for United States academic medical center websites, then apply this system to a sample for the purposes of testing this system and deriving insights from the results on potential areas of improvement.

Objective:

The primary aims of the study were to: 1) Adapt a pre-existing usability scoring methodology to academic medical centers; 2) apply and test this adapted usability scoring methodology on a sample set of academic medical center website and; 3) derive recommendations from these results on potential areas of improvements for our sample of academic medical centers websites.

Methods:

All website usability testing took place from 1 June 2020 to 15 December 2020. We replicated a methodology developed in previous literature and applied it to academic medical centers. Our sample included 73 U.S. academic medical centers. Usability was split into four broad categories: Accessibility (ability of those with low levels of computer literacy to access and navigate hospital’s Web presence), Marketing (ability to be found through search engines, examining the relevance of descriptions to the links provided), Content Quality (grammar, frequency of info updates, material relevancy, and readability), and Technology (download speed, quality of the programming code, and website infrastructure). Using these tools, we scored each website in each category. The composite of key factors in each category contributed to an overall “General Usability” score for each website. An overall score was then calculated by applying a weighted percentage across all factors and used for the final Overall Usability ranking.

Results:

The category with the highest average score was Technology, with a 0.82 (standard deviation of 0.068, standard error of 0.008). The lowest-performing category was Content Quality, with an average of 0.22 (standard deviation of 0.069, standard error of 0.008).

Conclusions:

Our data suggests that Technology, on average, was the highest scored variable amongst academic medical center websites. Because website functionality is essential to a user’s experience, it is justified that academic medical centers invest in optimal website performance. The overall lowest scored variable was Content Quality. A potential reason for this may be that academic medical center websites are usually larger in size, making it difficult to monitor the increased quantity of content. An easy way to improve this variable is to conduct more frequent website audits to assess readability, grammar, and relevancy. Marketing is another area in which these organizations have potential for improvement. Our recommendation is that organizations utilize search engine optimization techniques to improve their online visibility and discoverability.