The Relative Importance of Usability and Functionality Factors forE-Health Web Sites

With the growing usage of Internet, the demand for online healthcare infonnation and advice, and as a reply to that, the number of health related web sites are increasing. In case of online health information and advice, user interface replaces the face to face communication. To ensure users’ needs are met, it is critical to balance functionality and usability in the design of the web site. This study seeks to identify the complex interrelationships between various factors of usability and functionality in case of e-hcalth web sites. Two Turkish e-health web sites are assessed for this evaluation. As not only functionality and usability of a web site, but also some of their other factors arc related to each other, Analytical Network Process (ANP) is used to analyze the relative importance of the factors. Findings show that users of health information web sites give higher priority to functionality and the functionality factors with the highest relative importance are services/facilities and personalization/categorization of information.