Abstract
Many health professionals in developing countries lack the proper competence for the work they are doing. Tooltips have previously proven to be effective, and may assist such health professionals in their daily routines entering data to health information systems. By using qualitative and quantitative methods, this thesis aim to research two aspects of tooltips; finding user preference for content types for tooltips and evaluations methods to find the most effective tooltips, in terms of helping users enter correct data to the system. The target group is health workers in African countries, and especially those who lack the proper competence for the work they are performing. This research has included participants from three African countries, Malawi, South Africa and Ethiopia. Most of our findings are based on Malawian health workers, as they represent a greater share of our participants. We have used questionnaires, a modified question-suggestion approach and a quasi-experiment to explore preferences of tooltips, what tooltips would be effective, what methods one should use to find effective tooltips and whether tooltips have an effect or not. Firstly, we found that most of our participants prefer a range of normal values, instead of explanations, as content type for tooltips. Secondly, we found that tooltips containing explanations outperform those with normal values, in terms of correctness of data entry. Thirdly, we found that low content validity evaluations, such as a questionnaire, could not replace high content validity evaluations, such as field experiments. Lastly, we found that tooltips do have an effect, since the correctness of data entry increased and several participants stated that they learned from the tooltips.