Health Cards to Assist Decision Making in Consumer Health Search

Abstract

We investigate the effectiveness of health cards to assist decision making in Consumer Health Search (CHS). A health card is a concise presentation of a health concept shown along side search results to specific queries. We specifically focus on the decision making tasks of determining the health condition presented by a person and determining which action should be taken next with respect to the health condition. We explore two avenues for presenting health cards: a traditional single health card interface, and a novel multiple health cards interface. To validate the utility of health cards and their presentation interfaces, we conduct a laboratory user study where users are asked to solve the two decision making tasks for eight simulated scenarios. Our study makes the following contributions: (1) it proposes the novel multiple health card interface, which allows users to perform differential diagnoses, (2) it quantifies the impact of using health cards for assisting decision making in CHS, and (3) it determines the health card appraisal accuracy in the context of multiple health cards.

Figure 1:

The middle and right panes of SERP with a single-card (Left) and multi-cards (Right) for scenario 1.

Figure 2:

The user study activity flow.

Figure 3:

Percentage of participants’ that paid attention to snippets vs. health cards overtime.

Figure 4:

Diagnosis and urgency decisions before and after searching