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Consumer health information has proliferated on the Web. However, because virtually anyone can publish this type of information on theWeb, consumers cannot always rely on traditional credibility cues such as reputation of a journal. Instead, they must rely on a variety of cues, including visual presentation, to determine the veracity of information. This study is an examination of the relationship of people's visual design preferences to judgments of credibility of information on consumer health information sites. Subjects were asked to rate their preferences for visual designs of 31 health information sites after a very brief viewing.The sites were then reordered and subjects rated them according to the extent to which they thought the information on the sites was credible. Visual design judgments bore a statistically significant similarity to credibility ratings. Sites with known brands were also highly rated for both credibility and visual design. Theoretical implications are discussed.

This study sought to better understand search performance using an online portal containing a collection of heterogeneous library resources for K-12 students. Search performance is examined in terms of search success, search time, strategy, and effort. This study revealed unsuccessful searches tended to take longer than successful searches; preference of search strategy (searching vs. browsing) did not affect search success outcome; students tended to perform well in tasks for which they were able to use various strategies, and unsuccessful searches tended to use more effort-more mouse clicks, more keystrokes, more queries, more sites visited, and more strategy shifts. Implications of the study are also discussed.

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In thinking about the impact of social computing and Web 2.0 trends affecting information seekers (and the professionals who help them), the age-old problem of determining credibility in an authorless environment again comes to the fore. First impressions are key for web page content. Regardless of the quality or credibility of content, a poorly designed or aesthetically unappealing web page will likely produce a negative impression of credibility. This study compared credibility judgments for websites in which the visual design had been varied. A factor analysis showed patterns of higher credibility scores for higher visual design treatments. The importance of the findings presented here is that visual design has impact beyond decoration. It is a common (if latent) assumption that all serious web sites wish to be perceived as credible, believa ble, and trustworthy, especially in an authorless environment.