A Human-centric Accessible eHealth Booking Web Portal

Abstract

The use of eHealth web portals is rapidly increasing with the extensive demand for eHealth services and established benefits of using health-related software. Unfortunately, most of these applications underestimate or even ignore Human-centric issues (HCIs) and thus result in a system that is not fit-for-purpose. This emphasises the importance of allowing for diverse end-users characteristics, such as age, gender, culture, occupation, and cognitive impairment, when designing eHealth web portals. In this paper, we describe a study we conducted involving a preliminary survey in three languages to determine different users’ needs, taking into account their human-centric issues. We designed an e-booking prototype and evaluated it with user studies. Our results suggest that age and language are the most crucial human-centric aspects to be considered when developing an eHealth web portal. The study also provided recommendations for appropriate web design elements for building human-centric eHealth applications.