Assessing patient experience and patient preference when designing web support for smoking cessation

Patients will often resist campaigns to promote healthier behavior but the digital health revolution allows the creation of a much more nuanced set of health messages that can be tailored to the patient or end user. In this study we explore the effects of patient preference on message acceptance and also explore what happens when messages are framed in terms of patient experience. Smokers (n=113) viewed a quitting website in which material was expressed either as a factsheet or as patient experience (PEx) and where the material was either matched or unmatched to their own preferred quitting methods. Across a range of measures, we found strong evidence that preference matching was effective in motivating smokers to engage with the material and we found modest support for the role of PEx in reducing message resistance.