DEVELOPING AND EVALUATING THE GRIEFLINK WEB SITE: PROCESSES, PROTOCOLS, DILEMMAS AND LESSONS LEARNED

Abstract

Despite a profusion of recommendations regarding the quality of web sites and guidelines related to ethical issues surrounding health-related sites, there is little guidance for the design and evaluation of sites relating to loss and grief. This article, which addresses these deficiencies, results from a community consultation process of designing and evaluating a web site—GriefLink—for bereaved consumers and for the professionals who help them. It presents the literature review that informed the project, the recommendations for design and content, the lessons learned through the process itself, and the difficulties of evaluating the benefits of a grief-related web site. Some ethical and legal dilemmas in developing grief-related web sites are discussed and issues of design, content, process, evaluation, and general features are addressed, which may also be applied to other communication forms for loss and grief matters, such as the print media.

We wish to acknowledge grant funding from the South Australian Department of Human Services that made it possible to carry out this project. We would also like to acknowledge Immersion Technology who designed and constructed the GriefLink web site.

GriefLink is a dynamic website and some of the features suggested in this paper have not yet been included.

Notes

Non-starred features: original design features confirmed by the evaluation.

Starred features: result from the evaluation alone.