[Sigia-l] Pharma websites: the importance of a caregiver link on the homepage

[Jared M. Spool]

At 05:33 PM 7/26/2005, Mary Tung wrote:
>I am currently working on a drug website, and I'm wondering if there's
>any studies / opinions on the importance of having a "information for
>caregivers" link on the homepage.
>
>We decided not to put such a link on that homepage, but we need to
>make a complying reason why. [...]
>
>Please give me your thoughts on this, and any studies done on the
>usefulness of information for caregivers.

There's actually 2 issues here:

1) Providing information for caregivers
2) Putting a link saying "Information for Caregivers"

For #1, our research shows that this is definitely something that should 
seriously be considered. We did a tremendous amount of work in the area of 
chronic illness and having resources for caregivers of patients was a real 
need. People who are close to the folks that are suffering, but not 
suffering themselves, need a way to relate to what's going on. It's very 
hard for caregivers to truly understand what the patient is going through 
and how to be helpful. The caregivers we talked to were quite anxious to 
get their hands on anything that can help them.

For #2, very few of the caregivers ever thought of themselves as 
caregivers. In fact, people in our studies rarely know what labels to apply 
to themselves. As Stephanie mentioned, it's hard for people to know which 
category they are in. We recommend to our clients they focus on 
task-oriented links instead of user-type labels.

Jared

Jared M. Spool
User Interface Engineering
http://www.uie.com    jspool at uie.com

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