Improving the Design of Health Surveys on the Web

描述(由申请人提供)：这个项目的目标是发现改善网络调查和类似应用程序的界面设计的原则。虽然我们专注于网络调查，但相信我们的研究将对传达信息和捕捉信息的网页设计以及其他界面具有更广泛的影响。我们提出的研究考察了三个领域--屏幕设计、传达定义的方法以及专家和新手之间的差异。这三个领域都提出了重要的理论和实践问题，而这三个领域以前的研究都相对较少。我们的第一个目标是确定指导网页上最佳材料安排的原则。用户更喜欢中等程度的视觉复杂性，但其他功能(如视觉元素的逻辑排列)比纯粹的复杂性更关键。我们的第二个目标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，受访者往往因为各种原因而忽视定义材料--他们不愿花费精力去关注它，他们可能认为自己不需要它，他们可能不愿意应用定义，而实际上它是有用的。关于如何提高定义的有效性的工作很少。我们研究了几种方法--陈述一般规则，提到类别的具体例子，以及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用户和新手用户之间的差异。许多界面都是为适应新手或新手用户而设计的，因此可能包含对专家来说效率较低的功能。此外，专家可能会养成相当有效但不是最优的习惯。我们提出了四个实验来对比专家和新手用户的性能，证明具有许多界面的专家的性能很差，并开发出适应这两种类型的用户的方法。虽然我们探索这些问题的基本方法是在大规模、现实的网络调查中进行实验，但除了调查问题的答案外，我们还计划收集各种类型的“ParaData”(如响应时间和鼠标点击模式)。我们提出了几个后续实验，使用眼球跟踪设备来澄清受访者在完成调查时实际关注的信息。作为收集和传播公共卫生信息的工具，网络的爆炸性增长推动了该项目的开展。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卫生干预的卫生工作者有用。

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.