User-centred design of a web interface for a bibliographic database on women's health

Web usability design guidelines derived from a synthesis of the literature were used to evaluate two Web search interfaces for a bibliographic database on women's health information resources. The current interface is hosted on the Ontario Women's Health Council Secretariat website (OWHC). The OWHC is an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Care (Ontario, Canada). The new interface will be hosted on the Resources section of the Women's Health Matters (WHM) website, a bilingual Canadian consumer health portal on women's health issues. Six criteria for effective web interface design were identified: visual design; information architecture; navigation; search; universal usability, and help. Prior to conducting a literature-based evaluation of the two search interfaces, a series of evaluations were conducted with expert reviewers, IT experts and WHM content staff from Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre. Findings from both types of evaluation were compared and deemed to be similar. The current and future web search interfaces are aesthetically pleasing and offer standard search fields for conducting basic searches on the consumer health database. The OWHC search interface possesses one advantage over the prototype WHM interface; an alphabetically arranged list of health topics. However, the prototype WHM search interface offers more search options in both the basic and advanced search interfaces. Both the current OWHC search interface and prototype WHM interface suffer from inconsistency and/or lack of clarity in terms of labelling search fields and their options. Furthermore, the complexity of the WHM advanced search interface, in terms of number of search categories, impairs usability. Modifications to the prototype WHM search interface have been subsequently implemented by Women's Health Matters before the official launch of this consumer health database and its web interface on the WHM site in late 2003. Thus, two divergent methodological approaches can provide similar insights into effective web design and lead to improvements in the usability of web search interfaces.