Usability Evaluation of Published Clinical guidelines on the Web: A Case Study

Publishing clinical guidelines (GLs) on the web improves their accessibility. Although such publication is common, usability evaluation of GLs and their web presentation has been neglected. In this study we have carried out such an evaluation. Four of the most commonly used GL websites in Norway were selected for evaluation. In addition, we included UpToDate, which is widely used under a national licence in Norway. A total of 14 volunteer GL users participated in our case study. A pretest survey, scenario-based task completion, system usability scale (SUS) questionnaire, observation, and semi-structured interview were methods we employed. A step-by-step thematic synthesis method was used on the interview transcripts to identify themes. Analysis of the SUS results show that except for UpToDate, there was no correlation between user familiarity with the studied website and higher SUS score. Users were mostly concerned about the amount of text and scrolling, font size, no more than one navigation bar and no redirection to other websites. Keeping the same format and structure for presentation in all web pages and presenting numerical information in tabular format were the other suggestions for improvement. The results of this paper can be used by GL publishers to improve their websites usability.