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. 2024 Apr-Jun;30(2):14604582241262251.
doi: 10.1177/14604582241262251.

User experience of a family health history chatbot: A quantitative analysis

Hiral Soni  1 , Heath Morrison  1 , Dinko Vasilev  1 , Triton Ong  1 , Hattie Wilczewski  1 , Caitlin Allen  2 , Chanita Hughes-Halbert  3 , Jordon B Ritchie  2 , Alexa Narma  1 , Joshua D Schiffman  4 , Julia Ivanova  1 , Brian E Bunnell  1   5 , Brandon M Welch  1   2
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User experience of a family health history chatbot: A quantitative analysis

Hiral Soni et al. Health Informatics J. 2024 Apr-Jun.

Abstract

Objective: Family health history (FHx) is an important tool in assessing one's risk towards specific health conditions. However, user experience of FHx collection tools is rarely studied. ItRunsInMyFamily.com (ItRuns) was developed to assess FHx and hereditary cancer risk. This study reports a quantitative user experience analysis of ItRuns.

Methods: We conducted a public health campaign in November 2019 to promote FHx collection using ItRuns. We used software telemetry to quantify abandonment and time spent on ItRuns to identify user behaviors and potential areas of improvement.

Results: Of 11,065 users who started the ItRuns assessment, 4305 (38.91%) reached the final step to receive recommendations about hereditary cancer risk. Highest abandonment rates were during Introduction (32.82%), Invite Friends (29.03%), and Family Cancer History (12.03%) subflows. Median time to complete the assessment was 636 s. Users spent the highest median time on Proband Cancer History (124.00 s) and Family Cancer History (119.00 s) subflows. Search list questions took the longest to complete (median 19.50 s), followed by free text email input (15.00 s).

Conclusion: Knowledge of objective user behaviors at a large scale and factors impacting optimal user experience will help enhance the ItRuns workflow and improve future FHx collection.

Keywords: chatbot; family health history; health information technology; telemetry; user behavior; user experience.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared the following potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Dr Welch is a shareholder of Doxy.me Inc, Dokbot LLC, ItRunsInMyFamily.com, and Adhere.ly LLC, all of which integrate Dokbot into their software solutions. Heath Morrison is a shareholder of Doxy.me Inc, Dokbot LLC and ItRunsInMyFamily.com. Dr Schiffman is an employee of PEEL Therapeutics, has ownership interests in ItRunsInMyFamily.com and PEEL Therapeutics and serves in a consulting role in N-of-One and Fabric Genomics. Dr Bunnell holds a leadership position in Doxy.me Inc and is a shareholder of Adhere.ly LLC. Authors Hiral Soni, Dinko Vasilev, Triton Ong, Hattie Wilczewski, Alexa Narma, Julia Ivanova are employees of Doxy.me, Inc, a commercial telemedicine company and declare no conflict of interest. Other authors report no other conflicts of interest.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
ItRuns assessment workflow.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Percentage of retained users by subflows.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Stepwise abandonment in the Introduction subflow.
Figure 4.
Figure 4.
Stepwise abandonment in the Family Cancer History subflow.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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