BACKGROUND
Mobile health (mHealth) interventions are increasingly being designed to facilitate health-related behaviour change. Integrating insights from behavioural science and design science can help support the development of more effective mHealth interventions. Behavioural Design (BD) and Design Thinking (DT) have emerged as best practice approaches in their respective fields. Until now, little work has been done to examine how BD and DT can be integrated throughout the mHealth design process.
OBJECTIVE
The aim of this scoping review was to map the evidence on how insights from BD and DT can be integrated to guide the design of mHealth interventions. The following questions were addressed: (1) what are the main characteristics of studies that integrate BD and DT during the mHealth design process? (2) what approaches do mHealth design teams use to integrate BD and DT during the mHealth design process? (3) what are key implementation considerations, design challenges, and future directions for integrating BD and DT during mHealth design?
METHODS
We identified relevant studies from MEDLINE, PSYCINFO, EMBASE, CINAHL and JMIR using search terms related to mHealth, behavioural design, and design thinking. Included articles had to clearly describe their mHealth design process and how behaviour change theories, models, frameworks, or techniques were incorporated. Two independent reviewers screened articles for inclusion and completed the data extraction. A descriptive analysis was conducted.
RESULTS
A total of 75 articles met the inclusion criteria. All studies were published between 2012 and 2021. Studies integrated BD and DT in notable ways, which we refer to as “Behavioural Design Thinking”. Five steps were followed in the “Behavioural Design Thinking” approach: (1) empathise with users and their behaviour change needs, (2) define user and behaviour change requirements, (3) ideate user-centred features and behaviour change content, (4) prototype a user-centred solution that supports behaviour change, (5) test the solution against users’ needs and for its behaviour change potential. Key challenges experienced during mHealth design included meaningfully engaging patient and public partners in the design process, translating evidence-based behaviour change techniques into actual mHealth features, and planning for how to integrate the mHealth intervention into existing clinical systems. Guidance is needed on how to conduct the design process itself, how to meaningfully engage key stakeholders, and how to operationalize behaviour change techniques in a user-friendly and context-specific way.
CONCLUSIONS
Best practices from BD and DT can be integrated throughout the mHealth design process to ensure that mHealth interventions are purposefully developed to effectively engage users. Although this scoping review clarified how insights from BD and DT could be integrated during mHealth design, future research is needed to identify the most effective design approaches.
CLINICALTRIAL
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