"User Experiences of Spanish-Speaking Latinos with the Frontier Behavioral Health Website"

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About the Author

Raquel L. Dean holds a B.A. in Psychology and a M.A. in English with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Technical Communication from Eastern Washington University. She currently works for Kalispell Regional Healthcare as a School-based Mental Health Worker and plans to obtain her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in the near future. Her research interests lie in both psychology and technical communication, with topics including: minority mental health, child psychopathology (childhood trauma and anxiety disorders) and evaluating barriers among minorities when accessing and receiving mental health care, by facilitating usability tests to examine information design and observe the users' experience.

Contents

Introduction

Literature Review

Methodology

Test Goals and Objectives

Participants

Scenario and Test Tasks

Metrics

Results

Findings and Discussion

Conclusion

Limitations of Study

Recommendations for Future Research

References

Appendix A: Pre-Test Survey

Appendix B: Recruitment Email

Appendix C: Post-Test Interview

Limitations of Study

The majority of the users who participated in this study were college-aged individuals. In the beginning of this study, I had four user profiles and I wanted to recruit at least four participants per category (16 total participants). These four categories were: college student, single parent with a child or children, married with a child or children, elder (50+ years or older). None of the participants had children, twelve of the participants claimed to be “single,” and only one individual was “married but separated.” The oldest participant was 31 years old and was not a student and did not have a child or children. In the future, I would like to collect data from all of these user profiles in order to form a representative sample of Latinos for this study. Recruiting participants from the other user profiles I created would provide data that would shed light on the differences between a wider range of language proficiency, age, occupation, and technological experience, to see how all of those factors influence their user experience when interacting with the frontier behavioral health website. Another limitation of this study was that it was conducted using a Macintosh laptop, with a PC interface. I later discovered that the two interfaces have different homepage designs, which may lead to a difference in user experiences with the website. This could be further explored in future research.