BACKGROUND
Stroke caregivers often experience negative impacts when caring for a person living with a stroke. Technologically based interventions such as mHealth apps have demonstrated potential in supporting the caregivers during the recovery trajectory. Hence, there is an increase in apps in popular app stores, with a few apps addressing the healthcare needs of stroke caregivers. Since most of these apps were published without explanation of their design and evaluation processes, it is necessary to identify the usability and user experience issues to help app developers and researchers to understand the factors that affect long-term adherence and usage in stroke caregiving technology.
OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to determine the usability and user experience issues in commercially available mHealth apps from the user reviews published within the app store to help researchers and developers understand the factors that may affect long-term adherence and usage.
METHODS
User reviews were extracted from the previously identified 47 apps that support stroke caregiving needs using a python-scraper for both app stores (i.e. Google Play Store and Apple App Store). The reviews were pre-processed to (i) clean the dataset and ensure unicode normalization, (ii) remove stop words and (iii) group words together with similar meanings. The pre-processed reviews were filtered using sentiment analysis to exclude positive and non-English reviews. The final corpus was classified based on usability and user experience dimensions to highlight issues within the app.
RESULTS
Of 1,385,337 user reviews, only 162,095 were extracted due to the limitations in the app store. After filtration based on the sentiment analysis, 15,818 reviews were included in the study and were filtered based on the usability and user experience dimensions. Findings from the usability and user experience dimensions highlight critical errors/effectiveness, efficiency and support that contribute to decreased satisfaction, affect and emotion and frustration in using the app.
CONCLUSIONS
Commercially available mHealth apps consist of several usability and user experience issues due to their inability to understand the methods to address the healthcare needs of the caregivers. App developers need to consider participatory design approaches to promote user participation in design. This might ensure better understanding of the user needs and methods to support these needs; therefore, limiting any issues and ensuring continued use.