Student-Centered Design of a Mental Health Self-Management Tool

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an immense increase in the numerous barriers that prevent people from accessing healthcare, such as limited knowledge of available resources and lack of finances to pay for such resources. This issue has become even more apparent in college students and their mental health needs due to the closure of on-campus resources during the pandemic. To address these issues, mobile health (mHealth) technology has become more popular. Although there has been a significant increase in downloads for mHealth apps addressing mental health, these apps have poor usability and lack long-term adoption. A solution to this is implementing an iterative, user-centered design (UCD) approach that consists of collecting and utilizing end-user feedback into each step – requirements analysis, design, and evaluation – of the process. However, there is a general gap in the documentation of implementing a UCD approach for mHealth apps made to help college students with their mental health needs. This dissertation documents best practices to use at each step of the UCD process, examines the implementation of a UCD approach to develop the mental health and evaluation lookout program (mHELP) app made for college students to self-manage their mental health, and provides recommendations including a novel usability testing framework to evaluate mHealth apps. To develop mHELP, a requirements analysis was conducted from user feedback obtained through interviews and surveys. These responses were then analyzed using thematic and FIR analyses. With the FIR analysis, the design team initiated an iterative design process to create high-fidelity prototypes that were then evaluated using a multi-phased approach utilizing mixed methods. The main findings suggest that implementing a UCD approach increases the overall usability and effectiveness of mHealth apps and the use of an iterative and mixed methods approach at each phase can better understand end-users’ needs. Overall, this research highlights the importance of user-centered design in developing mHealth apps for mental health needs and provides practical guidance for researchers, designers, and developers.