Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Apr 21, 2021
Date Accepted: Sep 23, 2021
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
App Designs and Interactive Features to Increase mHealth Adoption: User Expectation Survey and Experiment
ABSTRACT
Background:
Despite ubiquity of smartphones, there is little guidance for how to design mobile health apps to increase use.
Objective:
We investigated what features users expect and how the design (prototypicality) impacts app adoption.
Methods:
In an online survey, we elicited expected app features. Following, participants viewed two health apps (high prototypicality, top downloaded apps, vs. low prototypicality, research interventions) and reported willingness to download, attention, and predicted use of app features. Participants rated both apps (high and low) for aesthetics, ease of use, usefulness, affordances, and intentions to use.
Results:
Most participants expected features for navigation or personal settings (e.g., menu) in specific regions (e.g., corners). Features fell into four unique categories based on attention and predicted use. When given a choice, most (75%) participants would download the high prototypical app. High prototypicality apps (vs. low) led to greater aesthetics, ease of use, usefulness, and intentions, all P<.001. Participants thought high prototypicality apps had more affordances.
Conclusions:
Intervention designs that fail to meet a threshold of mHealth expectations will be dismissed as less usable or beneficial. Our typology should guide presence and placement of expected app features to signal value and increase use to impact preventive health behaviors
Citation
