Web Health Information Architecture for Older Users

The present study utilized the card-sorting technique and cluster analysis to define the best information architecture of Web-based health information for older users. Some 16, older computer users participated in the card sorting, 20 in category identification and thirteen in category labeling experiments of 64 health and agingrelated Web pages from http://www.dmoz.org. The participants tended to group the items conceptually at higher levels of the hierarchy, but they tended to group the items based on similar words found in the titles at the lower level of the hierarchy. The study also found that user grouping produced more heterogeneous structure than the experimenters’ predefined information architecture. Category labels suggested by seniors were observed to be less formal and perhaps more useful than the category labels from http://www.dmoz.org. ____________________ Sri H. Kurniawan is a lecturer in the Department of Computation, UMIST, Manchester M60 1QD, UK [email protected] Panayiotis Zaphiris is a lecturer in the Centre for HCI Design, City University London, EC1V 0HB, UK [email protected]