mHealth Apps and Usability: Using User-Generated Content to Explore Users' Experiences with a Civilian First Responder App

Welhausen, Candice A.; Bivens, Kristin Marie (2021). mHealth Apps and Usability: Using User-Generated Content to Explore Users' Experiences with a Civilian First Responder App. Technical communication, 68(3), pp. 97-112. Society for Technical Communication

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Purpose: This study uses a qualitative content analysis approach to analyze existing user-generated content (UGC) for a civilian first responder mobile health or mHealth app, PulsePoint Respond. We argue that online review comments for these apps, the type of UGC we analyzed, can provide a rich source of untapped data for practitioners working in UX. We offer a UGC commenting heuristic that can help practitioners more effectively identify users' functional and productive usability concerns.

Method: We analyzed review comments (n=599) about PulsePoint Respond posted on the iOS platform between September 2016 and November 2019. Using open card sorting for data reduction, we eliminated 307 comments. We then created preliminary codes for the remaining 292 comments and used affinity diagramming to discuss, define, and finalize categories in order to analyze the final sample.

Results: We created a total of 14 categories, including "Unusable" or not actionable comments (307) and comments that were classified as "Multiple Categories" (45). The remaining 12 categories included Accurate Notifications (28), Audio (49), Compatibility and Integrations (8), Currency (58), Improvements (49), Location (27), More Agencies (50), Naming and Descriptions (41), Operating System/Battery/ Memory (6), Privacy (4), Updates (8), and Usability/Interface (23).

Conclusion: We found that functional usability considerations remain important for users. However, many users also commented on the limitations of particular functionalities and/or described actions they sought to perform that were not supported by the app. Drawing from our analysis, we propose a UGC commenting heuristic that can help practitioners more effectively identify users' functional and productive usability concerns.

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