Abstract
Urgent health issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, require rapid responses based on scientific evidence. Improving existing solutions is often faster, more effective and cheaper than developing new ones. This paper describes a case study consisting of a design cycle aimed at improving an existing design, a mobile app, to better support at-risk groups with healthy nutrition, to reduce risk of debilitating consequences of COVID-19. The design process consisted of five phases: user research (lived experience), expert consultations (learned experience), behavioural analysis of the original design, development of a new iteration, and delivery & evaluation. The case study showed that the design process indeed made an evidence-driven rapid iteration possible, and may serve as building blocks for developing a method for improving existing designs. Difficulties also arose, especially in the trade-off between rigour and completeness on the one hand, and budget and time constraints on the other.
Keywords
design for health, digital health, Covid-19, healthy eating
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.159
Citation
Hermsen, S. (2022) Healthricious: Improving an existing mobile app for healthy eating to support groups at risk of Covid-19, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.159
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Research Paper
Included in
Healthricious: Improving an existing mobile app for healthy eating to support groups at risk of Covid-19
Urgent health issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, require rapid responses based on scientific evidence. Improving existing solutions is often faster, more effective and cheaper than developing new ones. This paper describes a case study consisting of a design cycle aimed at improving an existing design, a mobile app, to better support at-risk groups with healthy nutrition, to reduce risk of debilitating consequences of COVID-19. The design process consisted of five phases: user research (lived experience), expert consultations (learned experience), behavioural analysis of the original design, development of a new iteration, and delivery & evaluation. The case study showed that the design process indeed made an evidence-driven rapid iteration possible, and may serve as building blocks for developing a method for improving existing designs. Difficulties also arose, especially in the trade-off between rigour and completeness on the one hand, and budget and time constraints on the other.