The impact of location on the use of information systems : Case study – health information kiosks

Touch‐screen kiosks are situated in a variety of locations to provide the public with ready access to health information. This paper examines their use, via the transactional logs, and makes comparisons between the types of organisation in which the kiosks are housed. Twenty‐one kiosks were selected and categorised into four groups – pharmacy, hospital, information centre and surgery. A small case study features a supermarket kiosk. Details of nearly 90,000 user sessions and 750,000 page views were used for the comparison. Comparisons between sites were made in terms of number of users, their age and gender, trends over time, the number of sessions conducted, page view time, session duration, pages viewed, site penetration, number of pages printed and health topics viewed. There were considerable differences between the kiosk locations. This early research provides the quantitative foundation for a fuller study of kiosk location and the differences in perceptions of the quality/authority of kiosk data.