Optimizing the user-experience (UX) and −interface (UI) of a mHealth application to aid recovery from burn injury (BurnCORE) through a user-centered design approach

Anticipatory guidance delivered via a mobile application (app) can support people with burn injury during the early recovery period. We sought to create a prototype app (Burn Connect and Recover – BurnCORE) to complement care provided at burn centers and serve as a transition to the burn survivorship community. We employed a user-centered design (UCD) approach in collaboration with a diverse group of burn care and technology stakeholders (e.g., patients, carers, clinicians, software engineers) to determine key content, functions, and interface preferences. UCD is an iterative design process where a multi-disciplinary team of application designers receive feedback from future end-users to improve understanding of user requirements, optimal features of user experience (UX), and user-app interface considerations (UI). We performed UCD according to its phases: Phase I--community advisory for foundational inspiration; Phase II--cognitive interviews with patients, their carers, and clinicians to determine key content and features; and Phase III--iterative co-design with stakeholders using low-fidelity prototypes. Participants in Phase I suggested that we focus on key gaps in knowledge of the timeline and domains of burn recovery, strategies to promote self-agency and motivation, eliminating barriers to using burn-specific resources, and select issues that aimed to improve UX. Stakeholders recommended several major application features: understanding the initial burn experience, visualizing recovery, and habituation of daily/weekly tasks. Examples of iterative stakeholder feedback include addition of recovery performance tracking, monitored community chat functions, and better ways to visualize recovery over time. UCD allowed us to confirm important burn recovery domains, define valuable features, and elicit from stakeholders key UX/UI features to optimize app engagement.