A Qualitative Analysis of User Reviews on Mental Health Apps: Who Used it? for What? and Why?

Abstract

The evidence of effectiveness of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) based mental health applications is shown to be equivalent with face-to-face CBT. Although there is a high number of users, the adherence of users to the intervention is low. Meanwhile, user non-adherence could happen on purpose. However, the reasons for this circumstance are not well examined, particularly from a user's perspective. The question of which features engage them to use as well as to continue using these interventions are not well understood. From the designer's perspective, to answer this question, it is essential to understand the context of app uses, particularly, three precedent questions: who are intended users, what they use it for, and why they use it need to be examined. This study answers these three questions by analyzing user reviews of several sample mental health applications which the core design is primarily based on a CBT. The qualitative analysis indicates that most of reviews are from people with common MH problems. Some people simply use the app to relax, track their mood, practice mindfulness, self-care, or build healthy habits. The majority of users have used the apps as complementary to the professional-based treatment. Users use the app because it makes them more positive, happy, self-conscious, calm, fun, focused, relaxed, motivated, mindful, self-controlled or better at sleep. Importantly, they highly appreciate the ability to figure out what going on their health, to help them keep on progress of health, to see correlation between causes and effects of their health problems, to conduct self-evaluation and self-reflection, to learn good things, to build good habits, and to provoke, reframe, and organize their thoughts. These findings will help the designers think of appropriate approaches to design the app which helps users better at achieving their targets.