Improving the Design of Health Surveys on the Web

改进网络健康调查的设计

基本信息

批准号：
7209533
负责人：
ROGER E TOURANGEAU
金额：
$ 27.9万
依托单位：
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN AT ANN ARBOR
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
财政年份：
2007
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2007-05-01 至 2011-04-30
项目状态：
已结题

项目摘要

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The goal of this project is to discover principles for improving interface designs for web surveys and similar applications. Although we focus on web surveys, but believe our studies will have broader implications for the design of web pages that convey information as well as capture it and for other interfaces as well. Our proposed studies examine three areas - screen design, methods for conveying definitions, and differences between experts and novices. All three areas raise important theoretical and practical questions, and all three have been the subject of relatively little prior research. Our first aim is to determine the principles governing the best arrangement of material on a web page. Users prefer intermediate levels of visual complexity, but other features (such as a logical arrangement of the visual elements) are more critical than sheer complexity. Our second aim is to determine the most effective methods for conveying definitions and other instructions. Prior research suggests that respondents often ignore definitional material for a variety of reasons - they are reluctant to expend the effort to attend to it, they may not think they need, it, and they may be unwilling to apply the definition when, in fact, it would be useful. There has been little work on how to improve the effectiveness of definitions. We examine several approaches - stating a general rule, mentioning specific examples of the category, and avoiding definitions altogether by asking very specific questions. Our third aim is to investigate differences between expert and novice users. Many interfaces are designed to accommodate novice or even first-time users and thus may include features that are inefficient for experts. In addition, experts may fall into habits that are reasonably effective but not optimal. We propose four experiments to contrast the performance of experts and novice users, to demonstrate the poor performance of experts with many interfaces, and to develop methods for accommodating both types of users. Although our basic method for exploring each of these issues is to conduct experiments embedded in large-scale, realistic web surveys, we plan to collect various types of "paradata" (such as response times and patterns of mouse clicks) in addition to answers to the survey questions. We propose several follow-up experiments that use eye-tracking equipment to clarify what information respondents actually attended to as they completed the surveys. This project is motivated by the explosive growth of the web as a vehicle for collecting and disseminating public health information. Our studies will help public health researchers gather more accurate information; in addition, our results will also be useful to health workers who are using the web to convey public health information or to deliver health interventions.

描述（由申请人提供）：该项目的目的是发现用于改进网络调查和类似应用程序的接口设计的原理。尽管我们专注于网络调查，但相信我们的研究将对传达信息以及捕获信息以及其他接口的网页的设计具有更广泛的影响。我们提出的研究研究了三个领域 - 屏幕设计，传达定义的方法以及专家与新手之间的差异。这三个领域都提出了重要的理论和实际问题，这三个领域都是相对较少的研究的主题。我们的第一个目的是确定有关网页上最佳材料安排的原则。用户更喜欢视觉复杂性的中间级别，但是其他功能（例如视觉元素的逻辑布置）比纯粹的复杂性更为关键。我们的第二个目的是确定传达定义和其他说明的最有效方法。先前的研究表明，出于多种原因，受访者通常会忽略定义材料 - 他们不愿花费去参加它的努力，他们可能认为自己不需要，并且可能不愿意应用该定义，而实际上它很有用。如何提高定义的有效性几乎没有工作。我们检查了几种方法 - 说明一般规则，提及该类别的特定示例，并通过提出非常具体的问题来完全避免定义。我们的第三个目标是调查专家和新手用户之间的差异。许多接口旨在容纳新手甚至是首次用户，因此可能包含对专家效率低下的功能。此外，专家可能会陷入相当有效但不是最佳的习惯。我们提出了四个实验，以对比专家和新手用户的表现，以证明专家的表现不佳，并开发了适合两种用户的方法。尽管我们探索每个问题的基本方法是进行嵌入在大规模，现实的网络调查中的实验，但我们计划收集各种类型的“ paradata”（例如鼠标点击的响应时间和模式），除了回答调查问题。我们提出了几个后续实验，这些实验使用眼线场设备来阐明受访者完成调查时实际关注的信息。该项目是由网络爆炸性增长作为收集和传播公共卫生信息的工具的动力。我们的研究将帮助公共卫生研究人员收集更准确的信息；此外，我们的结果也将对使用网络传达公共卫生信息或提供健康干预措施的卫生工作者有用。