JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Despite the abundance of health information for people who identify as transgender and gender diverse (TGD) on the Internet, much of the content is found on social media channels, leaving individuals to vet the information for relevance and quality.

Objective:

We developed a prototype transgender health information resource mobile app (TGHIR app) to provide credible health and wellness information for people who are TGD.

Methods:

We partnered with the TGD community and used a participatory design approach including focus groups and co-design sessions to identify user needs and priorities. We employed Agile software development methodology to build the prototype TGHIR app. A medical librarian and physicians with expertise in transgender health curated a set of 96 information resources that made up the foundational content of the prototype. To evaluate the prototype TGHIR app we assessed the app with test users using a single item from the System Usability Scale (SUS) to assess feature usability, qualitative interviews to explore our lowest rated feature, and using the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS) to evaluate overall app quality and the quality along six key domains.

Results:

Thirteen people who identified as TGD rated their satisfaction with 9 of 10 app features as ‘good’ (n= 7) to ‘excellent’ (n= 2), one feature – the ability to filter to narrow TGHIR resources- was rated as ‘okay’. The overall MARS score was 4.20 out of 5 after 2 weeks of use, indicating a good quality mobile application. The information score received the highest rating at 4.75 out of 5.

Conclusions:

Community partnership and participatory design are effective in the development of the TGHIR app resulting in an app with satisfying features and an overall good quality rating. Test users felt that the TGHIR app would be helpful for people who are TGD and their care partners.