PubMed results

From my PubMed search I discovered the concept of "culturally-relevant" website design. The article "Development of a Culturally Relevant Consumer Health Information Website for Harlem, New York" by Smith et. al. was particularly useful because it described in detail a process for gathering information and feedback from your target community in order to build a website that works well for that community. More general web design sources all state that your website should 'reflect its users' or 'take into account the intended audience' but they offer little guidance for how a designer might make that happen. Smith et al.'s abstract states: "Specifically, this article details how we sought to identify gaps, concerns, and uses of online health information and health care seeking in this local, predominantly racial and ethnic minority population. We review how we identified and addressed the multitude of variables that play a role in determining the degree of success in finding and using online health information, and include discussions about the genesis of the website and our successes and challenges in the development and implementation stages."

Unfortunately, my institution does not have access to the full article, but I could probably get it through interlibrary loan.

I was happy with how this search went. I had low expectations because I came in with the preconceived notion  that PubMed did not have much useful information about my topic and that what it did have would be hard for me to find because it is a subject-specific database outside any of my own areas of expertise. However, because I had the sense to make use of the database's help files and documentation, the search turned out to be very easy. All the literature in the searching courses I have taken mention the importance of consulting a database's help files, but it is easy in practice to think that either you are an experienced searcher so you don't need them or that they will be poorly-designed and unhelpful (this is only sometimes the case). Doing this search helped me learn an important lesson about database searching that I had been taught previously but had not really internalized until now.