JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Digital wellbeing apps are intended to support diverse needs in everyday life, and co-design can help identify users’ preferences for their development. Yet, there still remains a need to understand more deeply how users engage with wellbeing to identify how preferred features may vary.

Objective:

This study explored how participants’understanding and everyday practices of wellbeing informed their expectations of digital support, and under what conditions they appraised wellbeing app features and design elements as supportive or burdensome.

Methods:

Four in-person generative co-design focus group workshops were conducted with 27 adults who had used a wellbeing app during the previous year. Participants first completed an individual worksheet about their understanding and everyday practices of wellbeing and their previous experiences with wellbeing apps. They then designed an ideal wellbeing app and discussed their designs in the group. Written worksheet responses and workshop transcripts were analysed using an adapted framework approach.

Results:

Participants described wellbeing as a subjective state supported through diverse everyday practices. They expected an app to complement rather than replace these practices. Across retrospective accounts of previous app use and prospective ideal-app designs, notifications, tracking, personalisation, and artificial intelligence (AI) were appraised as potentially supportive or burdensome depending on users’ contextual clues.

Conclusions:

Results show that feature preferences in a potential wellbeing app are strongly linked to contextual sensitivity regarding users' own definitions of well-being. Preferences elicited through generative co-design should be interpreted as propositions. Subsequent prototyping could focus on testing progressive personalization and adjustable prompting.