Designing Self-reflective and Comprehensible Visualisation for Self-care Applications

Self-care applications generally are aimed to address various health issues and they are commonly featured with visuals or graphical representations. These visuals educate users to comprehend their health status in taking a proactive role in managing their healthcare independently. Self-care visuals have a greater role to play in self-care applications and therefore, they need to be carefully designed to be self-reflective and comprehensive, in meeting the current expectations and needs of the users. Existing guidelines for visuals are too focused and skewed towards the usability aspects, do not stress on self-care applications, and fail to address the current expectations of healthcare consumers. We have developed a model to aid developers to design effective self-reflective visualisations. In this paper, we have explored the perspectives of healthcare consumers on visuals in self-care applications. We also investigated the influence of age, gender, and technology experience on the design principles in the model. A quantitative study was executed involving 415 healthcare consumers to evaluate these design principles. SPSS was employed to analyse the data and several statistical tests were administered to assess the model. In general, it was apparent that healthcare consumers have specific requirements towards the visuals they come across in self-care applications. Overall, the following principles are found to be significant for designing visuals in self-care applications: flow, customizability, keystroke level, personalisation, heuristic evaluation, alerts and proactive support, cognitive walkthrough, accessibility, suitable graphs, dashboards, granularity, focus (self-care) and scope (healthcare).