Co-Designing the MOSAIC mHealth App With Breast Cancer Survivors: User-Centered Design Approach

Breast cancer is the world's most prevalent cancer. Although the 5-year survival rate for breast cancer in the United States is 91%, the stress and uncertainty of survivorship can often lead to symptoms of depression and anxiety. With nearly half of breast cancer survivors living with stress and symptoms of depression and anxiety, there are a significant number of unmet supportive care needs. New and potentially scalable approaches to meeting these supportive care needs are warranted.

This study aimed to engage breast cancer survivors and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) content experts in user-centered design (UCD) to develop a mobile health app (MOSAIC [Mobile Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Stress Intervention]) using stress intervention strategies.

We held 5 UCD sessions with 5 breast cancer survivors, 3 ACT content experts, 2 user experience design experts, and 1 stress expert facilitator over the course of 10 weeks. The sessions were developed to lead the 10 co-designers through the 5-step UCD process (eg, problem identification, solution generation, convergence, prototyping, and debriefing and evaluation). Following the fifth session, a prototype was generated and evaluated by the 5 breast cancer survivors and 3 ACT experts using the System Usability Scale, Acceptability E-scale, and a brief set of semistructured interview questions.

The 10 co-designers were present for each of the 5 co-design sessions. Co-designers identified 5 design characteristics: simple entry with use reminders (behavioral nudges), a manageable number of intervention choices, highly visual content, skill-building exercises, and social support. A total of 4 features were also identified as critical to the use of the tool: an ACT and breast cancer-specific onboarding process, clean navigation tools, clear organization of the interventions, and once-per-week behavioral nudges. These requirements created the foundation for the app prototype. The 5 breast cancer survivors and 3 ACT co-designers evaluated the app prototype for 1 week, using an Android smartphone. They rated the app as usable (mean 79.29, SD 19.83) on the System Usability Scale (a priori mean cutoff score=68) and acceptable (mean 24.28, SD 2.77) on the Acceptability E-scale (a priori mean cutoff score=24).

Through the UCD process, we created an ACT app prototype with 5 breast cancer survivors, 3 ACT experts, and 2 UCD designers. The next step in our research is to continue the assessment and refining of the prototype with additional breast cancer survivors. Future work will pilot-test the app to examine the feasibility of a large-scale, randomized control trial. Studies will enroll increasingly diverse breast cancer survivors to broaden the generalizability of findings.