The User Experience Framework for Health Interventions

Abstract Traditionally, a great part of the research related to the patient or user experience within clinical contexts, has only been exploring the user experience indirectly—or it has only been exploring some elements or aspects of the overall user experience. The purpose of this review is to investigate which aspects of the user experience are typically explored in the research literature and to shed light on the multifaceted nature of the user experience. We conducted a two-phase review of earlier research, consisting of a brief narrative review and a scoping review, exploring users’ experiences with therapeutic health interventions in both indirect and direct ways. Thirty studies, representing several thousands service users, were included in our scoping review. We extracted data related to the different aspects of the user experience covered in the reviewed research through descriptive synthesis. This revealed that a variety of aspects or facets related to the user experience were addressed across the different studies. To further specify these results, we conducted a thematic analysis based on the descriptive data. Through this analysis, we identified five main categories or dimensions relevant to the user experience with therapeutic interventions: 1) Perception of self as patient/user, 2) Perception of the therapist/intervention provider, 3) Perception of the therapeutic relationship/alliance, 4) Perception of the intervention/modality and 5) Perception of contextual factors. Based on this finding, we propose an user experience framework centred around these five domains. For each of the domains within the framework, several subordinate facets are also suggested based on our synthesis and analysis of the reviewed literature as well as clinical relevance. The proposed framework can be used to help understand, evaluate and promote users’ experiences with health interventions across user groups, interventions and contexts. Our framework highlights the multifaceted nature of the user experience, and the importance of considering all the different dimensions and facets of this experience in an integrative way both in research designs, health policy development and when implementing and evaluating health interventions in clinical contexts.