The Impact of Different Design Characteristics of Warning Message on Users' Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Effectiveness of Health Information Searching

Online health has developed rapidly in recent years. Patients can find enormous information about most diseases on the Internet, and in the meantime search engines has become a necessary tool for online health information seeking. However, there are also many obstacles for users to find the most satisfied information through search engines, for example information overload, the anonymity of network, the cheating of the search engine algorithm used by amoral websites, the rank auction of advertisement in search engines. The paper designed a theory model “the relationship between the providence of warning information and advices (process of users' empowerment) and the results of users' empowerment outcome”. through modifying the users' empowerment theory. This paper designed an experimental study, involving two different warning information contents (with detailed explanation and limited explanation) and two styles of warning information appearance (high visibility and low visibility) based on the prior literature and the focus group interviews. The findings showed visibility and explanation has significant main effect on perceived usefulness and perceived effectiveness of warning message. And there is significant interaction effect of visibility and explanation on perceived usefulness of warning message. However, the interaction of visibility and explanation on perceived effectiveness of warning message is not significant.