Development of Usability Guidelines for Mobile Health Applications

The healthcare space continues to embrace the convenience of mobile health applications, yet these app are not regulated nor standardized results in suboptimal results and potential patient harm. Xcertia aims to address this need by bringing together subject matter experts, stakeholders, academics, developers, and students to develop guidelines to steer mobile health app development. These team members were divided into five key workgroups: Privacy, Security, Content, Operability, and Usability. The current paper focuses on the Usability group and its process and development of its ten guidelines. Leveraging the unique strengths of academics and industry subject matter experts, the group researched, identified, and grouped key usability components into basic usability guidelines, each including its own set of detailed performance requirements. Employing an iterative process, the workgroup rigorously reviewed these requirements to capture only those that are vital to app efficiency and effectiveness. These ten guidelines cater to a wide audience with varying knowledge of usability and human factor principles and address the topics of visual design, readability and understandability, navigation, feedback, notifications, help resources and troubleshooting, historical data, accessibility, and app evaluation. The guidelines aim to guide mHealth stakeholders in developing safe and intuitive apps while also catering to target users within specific use environments.