Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jan 6, 2020
Date Accepted: May 14, 2020
Untold Stories in User-Centered Design of Mobile Health: Practical Challenges and Strategies Learned from the Design and Evaluation of an App for Older Adults with Heart Failure
ABSTRACT
Background:
User-centered design (UCD) is a powerful framework for creating useful, easy to use, and satisfying mobile health (mHealth) applications. However, literature seldom reports the challenges of implementing UCD, particularly in the mHealth arena.
Objective:
To characterize key challenges encountered and propose strategies when implementing UCD for mHealth.
Methods:
Our multidisciplinary team implemented a UCD process to design and evaluate a mobile app for older adults with heart failure. During and after this process, we documented challenges the team encountered and strategies they used or considered using to address those challenges.
Results:
We identified 12 challenges, three pertaining to UCD as a whole and nine across the UCD stages of formative research, design, evaluation. Challenges included the timing of stakeholder involvement, overcoming designers’ assumptions, adapting methods to end users, and managing heterogeneity among stakeholder participants. For these challenges, practical recommendations are provided to UCD researchers and practitioners.
Conclusions:
UCD is a gold-standard approach increasingly adopted for mHealth projects. Although UCD methods are well described and easily accessible, the challenges and strategies for implementing them are underreported. To improve the implementation of UCD for mHealth, we must tell and learn from these traditionally “untold stories.”
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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.