Abstract
Objectives: The purpose of the study is to evaluate the dental website usability in Korea. The dental website included dental university hospital, network dental hospital and dental office. Methods: The study was carried out by three age groups including twenties, thirties, and forties. Each group consisted of ten customers and evaluated twelve websites of dental hospitals. Each was assigned to four hospitals and three tasks including easiness of online reservation, preventive information, and treatment information. They filled out the self-administered questionnaire. The questionnaire included the easiness of on-line reservation, satisfaction on the quality and quantity of preventive informations, satisfaction on the quality and quantity of treatment informations, predictiveness on the sub-menu, usefulness of site map, information on the main page of web site, usefulness of decision on visit to dentistry, and revisit intention. Results: The easiness of on-line reservation was the highest in the private dental office, and university dental hospital and network dental hospitals followed in conducting task(1). The anticipated value and measurement on the usefulness of web site were the lowest in network dental hospitals and the time interval between two values was 57 seconds. This discrepancy showed the largest difference. The satisfaction on treatment information in task(3) was higher than that of the satisfaction on preventive information in task (2). The revisit intention was the highest in dental university hospitals. Conclusions: This study showed the comparison in usefulness of web site of university dental hospitals, network dental hospitals and private dental office. The web site focused on the treatment information rather than preventive information. This study suggested that the most important function of dental web site would be the preventive information that was mainly operated by the role of dental hygienists rather than treatment information in the future.
