Increasingly sophisticated interactive devices are being developed to meet the requirements of healthcare services that place greater emphasis on self-management. This article considers the importance of the relationships that users form with technology from the perspective of the human–computer interaction literature and the clinical psychology literature. It is argued that users are often willing to engage in relationships with technology that share many features of relationships between humans. Furthermore, within human-delivered healthcare, the quality of the relationship formed with a clinician predicts the effectiveness of the treatment. Thus, the effectiveness of interactive healthcare technology is, in part, dependent on the relationship the user forms with the technology. Applying psychological theory to the relationship between user and technology provides a way of understanding these human–computer interactions and thus improving the process of developing self-management technology.

Readers on the Web often skim through text to cope with the volume of available information. In a previous study, Duggan and Payne [11] tracked readers' eye movements as they skimmed through expository text under time pressure. This article presents novel analyses of these eye-movement data. Results indicated that readers were able to explicitly direct attention to the most important information in the text and that this improved performance on a subsequent test of memory for the meaning of text. We suggest readers achieve this by satisficing reading through text until the rate of information gain drops below threshold and then skipping to the next section of text. Further analyses of gaze patterns for paragraphs and pages supported this explanation. Combining satisficing with some form of scanning or sampling behaviour could explain patterns of reading found on the Web. A greater understanding of the way that text is read on the Web would assist many producers of online content.

The importance of background knowledge for effective searching on the Web is not well understood. Participants were given trivia questions on two topics and asked to answer them first using background knowledge and second by searching on the Web. Knowledge of a topic predicted search performance on that topic for all questions and, more importantly, for questions for which participants did not already know the answer. In terms of process, greater topic knowledge led to less time being spent on each Webpage, faster decisions to give up a line of inquiry and shorter queries being entered into the search engine. A more complete theory-led understanding of these effects would assist workers in a whole range of Web-related professions.