Bringing the field into focus: user-centered design of a patient expertise locator

Managing personal aspects of health is challenging for many patients, particularly those facing a serious condition such as cancer. Finding experienced patients, who can share their knowledge from managing a similar health situation, is of tremendous value. Users of health-related social software form a large base of such knowledge, yet these tools often lack features needed to locate peers with expertise. Informed directly by our field work with breast cancer patients, we designed a patient expertise locator for users of online health communities. Using feedback from two focus groups with breast cancer survivors, we took our design through two iterations. Focus groups concluded that expertise locating features proved useful for extending social software. They guided design enhancements by suggesting granular user control through (1) multiple mechanisms to identify expertise, (2) detailed user profiles to select expertise, and (3) varied collaboration levels. Our user-centered approac...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: CHI
• Authors: Andrea Civan-Hartzler, David W. McDonald, Chris Powell, Meredith M. Skeels, Marlee Mukai, Wanda Pratt
• Keywords: CHI 2010, Expertise Locating Features, Health, Human Computer Interaction, Social Software