Exploring user spiritual experience with Islamic websites for elderly

Abstract

Studies of the elderly have shown that the elderly may turn to spirituality and religion when they meet difficult life changing events and experience personal losses. Therefore, instilling hope, offering support and therapeutic interventions such as prayer, thought, morality, artistic expression or professional referrals through the means of ICT technology such as religious Web sites may lead to spiritual rejuvenation and healing. Internet has become a primary source of information about Islam for its Muslim followers and other people from different religious beliefs. There are thousands of Islamic Web sites on the Internet, however, majority of them were found low in user satisfaction. One of the reasons was because they failed to provide necessary spiritual experience to the users. Thus, this study was undertaken to explore user spiritual experience with the Islamic Web sites. We employed a user study with seven older participants to help us understand their spiritual experiences. We asked their experiences with two chosen Islamic Web sites and their own favourite Web sites. From the study, we learnt that user spiritual experience is very much affected by Islamic spiritual interfaces, trusted contents and the Web site usability.