Developing principles for the design and review of digital interventions in mental healthcare: a multi-perspective approach

The goal is to help designers create effective tools and empower mental health experts and patients in reviewing the design of these interventions. Thus, improving the user experience and design process of these interventions.

• Identification of the technical and design requirements, motivating factors, and perceptions towards adoption and continuous usage of digital health interventions (user-interfaces of conversational agents and mental health applications) by collaborating with the stakeholders.
• Provide designers with evidence-based principles in designing digital interventions (user interfaces of conversational agents and mental health applications) for mental healthcare.
• Provide mental health-care professionals with guidelines for reviewing the design of digital health interventions from a multi-stakeholder’s perspective before implementation.
• Provide patient representatives with heuristics and tools to review the adoption of digital mental health interventions.

01 September 2023 - 01 September 2027

In this PhD, we combine a systematic literature study with descriptive case studies and the insights gained from the design processes will facilitate a design study. During the design study stage, we will translate the principles (insights for the case studies and literature study) into proof-of-concepts and lo-fi prototypes using a co-design approach. The applicability of the principles and heuristics and the usability of the resulting design from the design study will be evaluated by stakeholders.

There would be possibilities to collaborate with students on the exploration and evaluation of existing design principles during their design of chatbots, mobile applications, immersive designs (VR) etc. and how they can be designed for mental healthcare.