Exploring Personalised Features of Health Information Websites – an Empirical Review

Personalisation of health information websites and portals is becoming a commonplace practice. Personalisation aims to improve users’ online experiences by providing relevant medical information in a timely manner. However, reported limited success of the health information websites demonstrates that users are dissatisfied with them. In the service quality theory, user satisfaction is linked to the consistency by which the service attributes are delivered. This study regards personalised features as service attributes and examines the consistency of their functionality through the conduct of a competitive analysis of eight most popular American and Australian health information websites. The results demonstrate a lack of consistency in the functionality of personalised features which might be linked to the lack of user satisfaction with the health information websites. Further research is needed to establish what functionality of personalised features is expected by users of the health information websites to increase their satisfaction and, subsequently, continuous use of these websites.