What Are Health Website Visitors Doing: Insights from Visualisations Towards Exploratory Search

Abstract

Understanding the navigation flows of health website visitors can lead to strategies for improved support for health information-seeking. In this study, we have obtained the navigation data of visitors to Better Health Channel - one of the largest consumer health information websites in Australia, and visualised the data to compare the different patterns of visitors' activities, as accessed on desktop and mobile devices. These visualisations provide insights about the preferences for search strategies, and the traffic flows patterns of visitors. We then discuss these insights with the existing work of health information-seeking behaviour. This paper extends our observations to design recomme..