Reality Versus user's Perception in Finding Answer to Clinical Questions in Published National Guidelines on the Web: An Empirical Study

Advances in information systems have enabled guideline developer organisations to disseminate the guidelines on the web with accompanied search functionality. The aim of searching functions is enabling guideline users to find the most relevant guideline for their clinical questions. Hence evaluating the user experiences in finding answers to their clinical questions in the published guidelines on the web with search functionality is important in order to understand the factors that affect users’ satisfaction and performance. Thus, in this study we studied how users interact with clinical guidelines during the decision making process, and examined how the structure of the clinical guidelines accompanied with search function impacted finding the right answer. We conducted an empirical study with a total of 19 medical students, divided into two groups. The first group accessed the list of all available national stroke guidelines while the second group accessed the most relevant guidelines. First a scenario was given to the participants. Second, the participants were asked to follow a set of tasks and then fill out a questionnaire. Analysis of the answers revealed that the more relevant the presented guideline was to the patient scenario, the more the user was successful in finding the right answer, the easier it was for the user to find the answer and the more satisfied the user was with the guideline structure. Although the objective measure of finding the answer in the second group was higher, their perception of finding the right answer was lower than the first group. Hence, a more detailed study is required to investigate what factors impacted the participant's perception score. Our findings highlight that conducting a usability test on the national guidelines user interface and investigating the best position of the search box for capturing the users’ attention are necessary.