Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Jan 1, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 1, 2025 - Feb 26, 2025
Date Accepted: Jul 5, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Optimizing Participant Engagement in Cyberhealth Co-Design: A Course-of-Action Framework Analysis
ABSTRACT
Background:
Co-design is recognized for its potential to enhance the usability of products through active user participation. However, participation alone does not guarantee the effectiveness of the resulting product. Understanding participants' engagement during co-design activities can provide valuable insights into their motivations, concerns, and contributions, which are critical to achieving successful outcomes.
Objective:
This study aimed to analyze participant engagement in a digital health co-design project. The project focused on developing a tool to facilitate support-seeking for elderly caregivers and involved three participant categories: caregivers, healthcare and social service professionals (HSSPs), and community workers.
Methods:
The project included 74 participants. Testimonies were collected from 20 participants using the self-confrontation interview methodology. Engagement was analyzed qualitatively using the course-of-action framework. The engagements were organized into emergent themes. The analysis focused on variations in engagement patterns across participant categories and sessions.
Results:
Three themes of engagement were identified: tool design, participant needs, and contextual situations. Engagement was distributed similarly across themes, except for community workers, who were more focused on needs (42%) than tool design (20%). There was significant variation in engagement over sessions, with tool design being more prominent during specific sessions (CoD5, CoD7, and CoD8) and less important during others (CoD4, CA2, CoD6, CA3). Activities directly tied to design tasks significantly enhanced engagement with tool design. These results underscore the influence of activity types in shaping participants' focus and involvement.
Conclusions:
This study highlights the role of affordances in co-design activities to balance engagement across design, collaboration, and participation dimensions. By strategically leveraging affordances, future co-design projects can optimize engagement and ensure more effective outcomes.
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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.