Mental health app design - A journey from concept to completion
Topham P., Caleb-Solly P., Matthews P., Farmer A., Mash C.
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 - Selfhelp for Anxiety Management, we present 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.