Remote Interviews and Visual Timelines with Patients: Lessons Learned

This article aims to support the design of remote user studies in the healthcare and well-being field. We introduce lessons learned from conducting remote interviews and using visual timelines as pretasks involving patients from two eHealth projects. Based on our experience, we conclude that remote interviews and visual timelines can provide rich data about user needs. However, careful planning is required. Building trust, rapport, confidentiality, and privacy requires extra effort from the researcher in studies involving sensitive topics. In this paper, we present a list of practical tips for planning qualitative health-related user studies.