Safe Fish, Smart Baby: Fish Consumption Advice for Pregnant Women
January 9, 2011 at 1:58 am 2 comments
I gave a talk at the MA Department of Public Health this week and started with a game called Hot or Not. I showed screen shots to get people’s instantaneous reactions, my point being that people leave a site if is not appealing. One of the sites that was considered very “hot” was Lu Xing’s beautifully-designed home page from her final project in Online Consumer Health at Tufts University School of Medicine.
Lu, a graduate student at Emerson College working toward a master’s degree in Health Communication, designed a site, “Safe Fish, Smart Baby: Fish Consumption Advice for Pregnant Women” that was motivated by “the fragmented information that pregnant women have received about the nutritional value and health risks associated with fish consumption resulted in confusion and misperceptions.”Lu’s aim for to “create a credible and professional website that provides clear fish consumption advice, fish coupons, and fish preparation skills for pregnant women, to help them make informed fish consumption decisions, so that they can have a smart and healthy baby.” Her paper describes the steps she took to design her site. Lu and I welcome your feedback on her well-written and insightful final paper.
Entry filed under: health, online health communities. Tags: advice, health, health literacy, medicine, online consumer health.
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Lisa Gualtieri is Assistant Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine in the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine. She is Director of the 
Lisa Gualtieri 
1.
Lynda Mitchell | January 10, 2011 at 3:22 am
As someone who admittedly has a website that would quickly get rated “Not” rather than “hot,” I want to compliment you on a very impressive project and home page.
I read your paper and found it very thorough. I actually found the information about fish enlightening, and I do not fit any of your personas. Safe fish is an issue many struggle with, not just pregnant or breastfeeding moms. Could that mean you might have yet another potential user of your website?
Some other things that I will just comment on in case it’s of help to you:
1. I noticed your HON code is “above the fold” in an area of valuable home page real estate. Did your research show that consumers look for the HON code? I suspect they don’t look for it as much as those of us in the health care field wish they did. And I say this as a one who is the caretaker for our health website which has had the HON code since day one. We keep ours at the bottom of our home page.
2. I think your budget will also need to include the costs of a CRM (customer relationship database) or database for storing registration data and other databases to store user-generated content, and the cost for email list service (constant contact, vertical response, etc.).
3. Lastly, I noticed you are not planning to use advertising- do you have a revenue model?
Best wishes for your success with your website! I hope this is helpful.
Lynda
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Lu | January 19, 2011 at 12:49 am
Thanks very much for your comments, Lynda. They are all very valuable and helpful!
I’m glad that you found the information on fish enlightening.
The comment on HON code is a very good point. I didn’t do a research on it and my guess is that most people are still not familiar with HON code. I do agree and realized all design elements on a website should be based on audience research.
This assignment is just a start, and I surely need to learn more about marketing and budget for a website in the future.
Again, thanks a lot for your interest and comments. I really appreciate it.