Currently accepted at: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Oct 24, 2024
Open Peer Review Period: Nov 20, 2024 - Jan 15, 2025
Date Accepted: Feb 18, 2026
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
This paper has been accepted and is currently in production.
It will appear shortly on 10.2196/67818
The final accepted version (not copyedited yet) is in this tab.
Exploring usage, usability, and functionality in the iterative testing of a co-designed preventative mental health smartphone app for University students: Monash THRIVE app development trials.
ABSTRACT
Background:
The emergence of digital tools in the health and mental health spaces is a necessary development to meet the growing need for preventative recognition and early care. Such tools must be appropriately tested throughout the development process to ensure they are fit for purpose and both empirically and clinically valid. However, it is also critical that these tools are developed in an iterative and user focused manner to ensure they meet user needs for usability and functionality.
Objective:
The current study explores the iterative testing of usage, usability and functionality key performance indicators of the preventative mental health app: Monash Thrive. It was hypothesised that there would be an improvement in all variables in the second iteration testing of the app compared to the initial iteration.
Methods:
Two iterative trials of the app were compared, including an initial trial of the minimal viable product (MVP) of the app across 4 weeks of use and a secondary trial of the beta version of the app, redeveloped post- MVP testing, across 12 weeks of use.
Results:
Despite redevelopment and resulting hypothesis there was no significant improvement observed across any variable when comparing the two trials.
Conclusions:
Although testing hypotheses were not supported, these lack of findings demonstrate the core importance of iterative testing to ensure that changes or upgrades are delivering the desired improvement in usage, usability and functionality. Clinical Trial: Two trials were included in the current manuscript. Trial 1 was registered with the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ACTRN12622001054707). Trial 2 was registered with the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ACTRN12623000131651).
Citation
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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.