Consumer Trust in a Health Website
February 22, 2009 – 09:24 by Dani Iswara. Words count: 230.Last updated: Monday, February 23, 2009 at 23:12.
Dani Iswara .Net has some notes on how to gain a consumer trust in a health websites and weblogs. Increasing trust of users generated content in a trend of Web 2.0+, Health 2.0+, Medicine 2.0+, or whatever they say, is a challenge.
As a user, I will more respect that health websites or weblogs have a/an:
- Static pages
- professional design look, usable, and accessible
- real name, photos, team photos, organization, or curriculum vitae if needed (e.g. explained on the
aboutsection) - project list of their experience, or portfolio
- easy and secure contact form, or phone contact
- policy on sensitive information (e-mail, medical record)
- third party reviews, testimonials from their users, customers, or HONcode-like accreditation
- regular update (last update time are available)
- Dynamic/post pages
- usable and accessible links to valid sources that credible
- separated editorial and promotional/advertorial contents
- time information (in every posts, or uniform resource locators, and last update information).
Do you have another opinion?
It’s all about trustworthy health information. Put quality of health information on the Internet in a question mark first.
In the Internet world, anyone can be a health information provider. As a reader, better if we should be ‘paranoid’ but still objective. Use some questions:
- who is the author of that post?
- what other say about the topic?
- is this the fact or just an opinion?
- are those real testimonials?
- when did they last update their post?
- and other critical questions…
Be careful with any health information from untrusted websites and weblogs. Please consult your doctor.
Dani Iswara, mail me: [myfirstnamelastname]@gmail.com or use contact form.
Comment by JAUHDIMATA on February 22, 2009 at 13:05:39
using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.6 on Windows XP
waduh aku gag ngerti karo bahasa iki
yaudah yang penting salam kenal balik deh.
Comment by natasha on March 24, 2009 at 20:50:55
using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.7 on Windows XP
I agree with your opinion about professional look on health information site will gain more trust from visitor thus making them as a frequent visitor.
However the new trend that I saw a weeks back, Internet users tend to visit to health site with .gov domain or wikipedia because of their high trusted reputation.
Comment by dani on March 25, 2009 at 04:30:56
using Mozilla Firefox 3.0.7 on Gentoo Linux
natasha,
in Indonesia, our go.id sometimes optimized only for Internet Explorer.
Wikipedia is open authors with less authority. Maybe medical wiki such as Ask Dr Wiki will gain more trust than Wikipedia.