Putting FUN into involvement: feedback user needs in the design of a mobile phone app for people with long-term conditions

Involving users in the design of health mobile phone apps is important to their success. This article reports on the involvement activities of people with long-term health conditions in a project called P-STEP. This is a unique project combining health and environmental data within a mobile phone app to offer advice to people with long-term conditions on walking time and where to walk to avoid air pollution. The article aims to highlight a locally created involvement approach called FUN (Feedback User Needs) and to showcase the difference this made both to the end product (the mobile phone app prototype) and to the user’s experience (how users felt about being involved in the project). Firstly, by focusing on the discussion groups and validation workshops, the article will show how users made a difference and had an impact on the design. Secondly, users contributed to the writing of this article and provided written narratives of their experiences. These experiences are used to reflect on the quality and consistency of our approach with users and what made a positive difference to them in being involved. Overall, the FUN approach was successful in ensuring that user contributions influenced the design of the app and provided a positive experience of the project. We offer this approach as an example of involving users in the design of a health mobile phone app and the methods for encouraging positive involvement outcomes in similar projects. This article is about how people with long-term conditions were involved in the design of a mobile phone app. Mobile phone apps can fail because they do not meet people’s needs. Involving people who may use the app is therefore very important. In this article, we write about how we involved potential users and what difference they made to the design. We also asked for the views of users to include in the article. We called our approach FUN, which stands for Feedback User Needs, because it was about feeding back what users needed to the different teams who created the app. Our approach included online discussion groups and face-to-face workshops that brought users and design staff together, and written documents to show the designers what users said. We found that using FUN enabled users to influence the design of the app and feel they made a difference. We wanted to share our work with others as a good example of involving people with long-term conditions in the design of a mobile phone app.