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Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies offer designers the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction grammars, whose implications for conceptual modeling still need to be fully understood. An open problem is the ability to characterize the fluid, smooth and organic nature of the user interaction and navigation in ways that allow web engineers to share through a common vocabulary, as well as sketch, explore and specify design decisions in the light of usability requirements and stakeholder's goals. The purpose of this paper is to address this problem.

To meet this challenge, the authors extend IDM (Interactive Dialogue Model), a dialogue‐based approach focusing on the conceptual dialogue flow with the user, codifying a set of key modeling constructs in order to describe the new dialogue features of RIAs.

The approach, called Rich‐IDM demonstrated some relevant features: expressiveness to capture interactive features at a high level of abstraction, semi‐formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between designers and web engineers, and traceability of the design to important usability requirements.

The paper proposes a simple way to fill the gap between hypermedia design and user experience design for RIAs, which is an open issue, both from the web engineering point of view and the human‐computer interaction point of view.

The authors have described how Rich‐IDM can help designers to capture and cope with some RIA interface flaws. In this case, the benefits of the approach are directly related to the semantics of its primitives.

The authors' proposal is the first, consolidated step of a promising research avenue.

While hospitals have done much over the last five years to push new media marketing, little research has been done to find out whether such endeavors are justified by users' healthcare online information consumption. This study attempts to find evidence for or against such endeavors.

Using the Delphi technique, this study investigated both users' healthcare video consumption behavior and their underlying rationales through three rounds of questions among 30 users of varied demographic backgrounds as a purposive sample.

Most participants did not watch videos hospital web sites because of their stereotypical understanding that hospital web sites provide no more than clerical information and because of videos' perceived inefficiency in delivering relevant and personalized information. However, most participants expressed their willingness to watch videos if the presentation is improved.

Although the Delphi technique is arguably the best approach when there is no defined population for sampling, a small sample may still be inadvertently biased toward the participants.

Hospitals need to make users aware of the abundant healthcare information in multimedia formats including video on their web sites, present the relevant content, and make such presentations easily digestible.

Hospitals' move into online new media marketing may help hospitals establish levels of trust with their online users comparable to the levels doctors currently enjoy and encourage consumers to visit hospital web sites as part of their healthcare decision‐making process.

For the very first time, this study has answered from the users' perspective and with evidential support the question whether hospitals' march into new media marketing is justified.