Abstract
The rise of digital health led to the accelerated emergence of health and wellness apps aimed to alter behaviours. Despite the prominence of these apps, there are no systematic approaches to evaluate their success. This paper introduces 13 heuristics, or guidelines, that facilitate the evaluation of digital solutions aimed to improve health and wellness outcomes. The present heuristic evaluation serves as a tool for teams to assess whether an app may be conducive to meaningful behaviour change.
The heuristic evaluation is rooted in a framework centered around the intricate relationship between an app, user, and environment. We refer to it as the ARC framework. The evaluation within the framework is not intended to replace existing ones such as Nielsen and Molich’s usability heuristic evaluation, but to complement them. Specifically, the present evaluation does not concern itself with the user-friendliness of a product; it assesses whether an app is conducive to meaningful behaviour change. Needless to say, the app may be informed by cognitive neuroscience findings and aligned with behaviour change best practices; however, without the usability layer, users would not make it far enough to achieve their behavioural outcomes. The proposed heuristic evaluation fills a gap for evaluating whether a digital solution has the potential to lead to meaningful and long-lasting behaviour change.
The paper is supported by Macadamian, a healthcare consultancy, and written in collaboration with Lorraine Chapman. The ARC framework and present heuristic evaluation were co-created by Macadamian’s UX, Behaviour change and Design team led by Jennifer Fraser. The main contributors are Alex Soleimani, Roxana M. Barbu, and Caroline Zenns; thus, anecdotally, the ARC framework. My gratitude goes to Frank Spillers for our insightful discussion on the breadth of heuristic evaluations. A special thank you goes to Cathy Agyemang, for being my sounding board and for reviewing the paper more times than I can count.
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Notes
- 1.
The framework can inform the design of other products such as software, but, for the purpose of this paper, we are focusing on digital health and wellness apps.
- 2.
An example of strictly usability related feedback would be how the app informs the user that they successfully submitted a piece of information. Given a button that says Submit, once the user clicks it, there are several ways in which the app may acknowledge that action has been successful: the button may physically change states (skeuomorphism); the button may change label to say submitted; or there may be a message beside the button to say, “Thank you, your application was submitted.”.
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Barbu, R.M. (2021). Is Your App Conducive to Behaviour Change? A Novel Heuristic Evaluation. In: Soares, M.M., Rosenzweig, E., Marcus, A. (eds) Design, User Experience, and Usability: UX Research and Design. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12779. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78221-4_14
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