Digital visibility and its impact upon online usage: Case study of a health Web site

Digital visibility, a term coined by the Ciber research team at UCL, argues that use/consumption in the digital environment is not simply a function of need; it is also a function of visibility or prominence. It is a concept that describes and explains the impact of menu and topic prominence on transaction log (usage) statistics. This study repeats Ciber's digital visibility study, which was concerned with a Digital Interactive Television (DiTV) health information service, but this time the subject is a UK consumer health Web site, MedicDirect, a site attracting around a thousand users and 10,000 page views a day Specifically the paper examines the change in use that results from increasing the prominence of two health pages - the cancer menu and cardiopulmonary resuscitation page on the Web site. The study was conducted over a three-month period when the links to the two health topics were placed on the home page and then moved and changed three times. Transactional log analysis was used to monitor the changes that occurred, the key metrics employed being number of users, number of page views, number of pages viewed in a session and number of visits made. It was found that, as predicted on the basis of our earlier results, use did indeed increase as a result of improving topic visibility. The results add further support to the findings of the initial digital visibility study.