Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Jun 27, 2022
Date Accepted: May 2, 2023
Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins with a Single Step: Thematic Analysis of Factors Reducing the Use of a Persuasive mHealth App and How to Mitigate Them
ABSTRACT
Background:
Studies on what persuasive features may work for different users in health context are rare. In this study, our participants were micro-entrepreneurs. We built a persuasive mobile app for helping them to recover from work. Representatives of this target group generally tend to be very busy due to work, which was also reflected on their use of the app during the controlled randomized trial intervention. Micro-entrepreneurs also often have dual roles – they are professionals on their line of work and at the same time entrepreneurs managing their own business – which may add to workload.
Objective:
In this paper we present users’ views on what factors hindered their use of mobile health (mHealth) app that we developed and how could these factors be mitigated.
Methods:
We interviewed 59 users and conducted both data-driven analysis and theory-driven analysis from the interviews.
Results:
Factors reducing the use could be divided into three categories: use contexts (problem domain related issues e.g., lack of time due to work), user context (user related issues e.g., concurrent use of other apps), and technology context (technology related issues e.g., bugs and usability). Due to the nature of the participants’ entrepreneurship, which often intervenes with personal life, it became clear that designs targeting similar target groups should avoid steep learning curves and should be easy (quick) to use with good usability.
Conclusions:
Personalized tunneling, guiding the user through a system via personalized solutions, could help similar target groups with similar issues to better engage and keep using health apps due to easy learning curve. When developing health apps for interventions, background theories should not be interpreted in too strict manner. Applying theory into practice may require rethinking approaches for adaptation, as technology has evolved fast and keeps on evolving further. Clinical Trial: 24.08.2018 ClinicalTrials.gov ID NCT03648593 Retrospectively registered.
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