Exploring user spiritual experience with Islamic websites for elderly

Studies of the elderly have shown that the elderly may turn to spirituality and religion when they meet difficult life changing events and experience personal losses. Therefore, instilling hope, offering support and therapeutic interventions such as prayer, thought, morality, artistic expression or professional referrals through the means of ICT technology such as religious websites may lead to spiritual rejuvenation and healing. Internet has become a primary source of information about Islam for its Muslim followers and other people from different religious beliefs. There are thousands of Islamic websites on the Internet, however, majority of them were found low in user satisfaction. One of the reasons was because they failed to provide necessary spiritual experience to the users. Thus, this study was undertaken to explore user spiritual experience with the Islamic websites. We employed a user study with seven older participants to help us understand their spiritual experiences. We asked their experiences with two chosen Islamic websites and their own favourite websites. From the study, we learnt that user spiritual experience is very much affected by Islamic spiritual interfaces, trusted contents and the website usability.