User Experience of Symptom Checkers: A Systematic Review

TL;DR

This systematic review analyzes existing literature on symptom checkers, highlighting user demographics, explored experience aspects, and suggesting improvements in accuracy, safety, and usability for future designs.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of user experience research on symptom checkers and offers design recommendations based on identified gaps.

Findings

Most users are relatively young

Eight aspects of user experience have been studied

Future improvements should focus on accuracy, safety, and usability

Abstract

This review reports the user experience of symptom checkers, aiming to characterize users studied in the existing literature, identify the aspects of user experience of symptom checkers that have been studied, and offer design suggestions. Our literature search resulted in 31 publications. We found that (1) most symptom checker users are relatively young; (2) eight relevant aspects of user experience have been explored, including motivation, trust, acceptability, satisfaction, accuracy, usability, safety or security, and functionality; (3) future symptom checkers should improve their accuracy, safety, and usability.