Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jul 5, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 9, 2018 - Sep 3, 2018
Date Accepted: Mar 30, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Development and Validation of an mHealth App Usability Questionnaire (MAUQ)
ABSTRACT
Background:
After an mHealth app is created, one important step is to evaluate the usability of the app before it is released to the public. There are multiple ways of conducting a usability study, one of which is collecting target users’ feedback with a usability questionnaire. Different groups have used different questionnaires for mHealth app usability evaluation; commonly used questionnaires are the System Usability Scale (SUS) and Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire (PSSUQ); however, SUS and PSSUQ were not designed for evaluating the usability of mHealth apps. Self-written questionnaires are also commonly used for mHealth app usability evaluation but they have not been validated.
Objective:
The goal of this project was to develop and validate a new mobile health app usability questionnaire.
Methods:
An mHealth app usability questionnaire (MAUQ) was designed by the research team based on a number of existing questionnaires used in previous mobile app usability studies, especially the well-validated questionnaires. MAUQ, SUS, and PSSUQ were then all used to evaluate the usability of two mHealth apps: one an interactive mHealth app and the other a standalone mHealth app. The reliability and validity of the new questionnaire were evaluated. The correlation coefficients among MAUQ and SUS, PSSUQ were calculated as well.
Results:
In this study, 128 study participants provided responses to the questionnaire statements in this study. Psychometric analysis indicated that the MAUQ has three subscales and their internal consistency reliability is high. The relevant subscales correlated well with the subscales of the PSSUQ. The overall scale also strongly correlated with the PSSUQ and SUS. Four versions of the MAUQ were created related to type of app (interactive or standalone) and target user of the app (patient or provider). A website has been created to make it convenient for mHealth app developers to use this new questionnaire to assess the usability of their mHealth apps.
Conclusions:
The newly created mHealth app usability questionnaire – MAUQ – has the reliability and validity required to assess mHealth app usability.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.