Mental health app design – a journey from concept to completion

Topham, Phil; Caleb-Solly, Praminda; Matthews, Paul; Farmer, Andy; Mash, Chris

Abstract

The development of a mental health app, one with significant potential for impacting on and transforming peoples’ lives, requires a diligent approach for integrating and delivering clinical expertise which is to be used by a vulnerable user group. The challenges include ensuring adequate involvement of a user group that is not only hard to recruit, but equally complex to engage with in order to ensure ecological validity of the different elements of the user-centred design process. Discussing the design and deployment of an anxiety management app, SAM [Self-help for Anxiety Management], we discuss approaches adopted to address the challenges involved and the impact these had on the final design. The paper concludes with a set of pragmatic recommendations, based on our experience of the process.

Citation

Topham, P., Caleb-Solly, P., Matthews, P., Farmer, A., & Mash, C. (2015, August). Mental health app design – a journey from concept to completion. Paper presented at MobileHCI2015: 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, Copenhagen, Denmark

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (unpublished)
• Conference Name: MobileHCI2015: 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services
• Start Date: Aug 24, 2015
• End Date: Aug 27, 2015
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: mobile app design, mental health app, user-centred design process
• Publisher URL: http://mobilehci.acm.org/2015
• Additional Information: Title of Conference or Conference Proceedings : MobileHCI 2015: 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services