JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Diabetes is one of the leading causes of death in developing countries. The existing mHealth app design guidelines lack the support of continuous self-monitor health status, behavior change to improve and adopt a healthy lifestyle, and communicate with health educators and healthcare professionals in case of any need.

Objective:

This study presents the development of a specialized set of heuristics called heuristic evaluation for mHealth apps (HE4EH) as an all-in-one tool and its applicability by performing a heuristic evaluation of a mHealth app.

Methods:

An extensive review of heuristics and checklist was used to develop HE4EH. The HE4EH was evaluated with the domain experts for heuristics, checklist items, severity ratings, and overall satisfaction. OneTouch app, which helps individuals with diabetes to manage their blood sugar, was evaluated using HE4EH to identify usability problems that need to be fixed in the app.

Results:

The expert evaluation of HE4EH revealed that heuristics were important, relevant, and clear. The checklist items across the heuristics were clear, relevant, and acceptably grouped. In terms of evaluating the OneTouch app using HE4EH, the most frequently violated heuristics include Content, Visibility, Match, and Self-monitoring. Most of the usability problems found were minor. The system usability scale (SUS) score indicates that the OneTouch app is marginally acceptable.

Conclusions:

This heuristic evaluation using of OneTouch app shows that HE4EH can play a vital role for designers, researchers, and practitioners to use HE4EH heuristics and checklist items as a tool to design a new or evaluate and improve an existing mHealth app.