Formulating design principles self-reflective and comprehensible self-care systems

• Main Author: Archanaa Visvalingam, Ms.
• Format: text::Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Formulating design principles self-reflective and comprehensible self-care systems

The rapid development in technology to improve healthcare is apparent with the increasing interest and numbers of self-care applications that are easily accessible to healthcare consumers through their phones. Although self-care applications are aimed to address various health issues, they are commonly featured with visuals or graphical representations. These visuals educate users to comprehend their health status in taking a proactive role in managing their healthcare independently. We argue that these visuals have a greater role to play in self-care applications, and hence they need to be carefully designed to be self-reflective and comprehensive, in meeting the current expectations and needs of the users. Existing guidelines for visuals are too focused on the usability aspects, do not emphasize visuals in self-care applications, and fail to address the current needs of healthcare consumers. A combination of suitable design factors is required to aid the development of visuals in self-care applications. In this thesis, a novel model listing the essential design principles for visuals in self-care applications is presented and evaluated. An exploratory-design method is employed in this study, whereby several studies are undertaken from conceptualizing to evaluating the proposed model. Different types of health information visuals and relevant design factors are reviewed. Perspectives of both the healthcare consumers and healthcare professionals are incorporated in the model formulation process. A focus group discussion study (FGD) with eight healthcare consumers and semi-structured interviews with ten healthcare professionals are conducted to gauge their perspectives and requirements towards visuals presented in self-care applications. Based on the data gathered, 14 design principles classified into the following four dimensions are included in the model: configurability, learnability, complexity, and fidelity. A quantitative study is executed involving 415 healthcare consumers to evaluate these design principles. The SPSS software package is employed to analyse the data, and several statistical tests are executed to evaluate the model. Overall, the findings indicate the following 13 design principles to be significant for designing visuals in self-care applications: flow, customizability, keystroke level, personalisation, heuristic evaluation, alerts and proactive support, cognitive walkthrough, accessibility, suitable graphs, dashboards, granularity, focus on self-care and scope (healthcare).