• Rebecca Schnall, Marlene Rojas, Suzanne Bakken, William Brown, Alex Carballo-Dieguez, Monique Carry, Deborah Gelaude, Jocelyn Patterson Mosley, and Jasmine Travers.
• School of Nursing, Columbia University, New York, NY, United States. Electronic address: rb897@columbia.edu.
• J Biomed Inform. 2016 Apr 1; 60: 243-51.

BackgroundMobile technologies are a useful platform for the delivery of health behavior interventions. Yet little work has been done to create a rigorous and standardized process for the design of mobile health (mHealth) apps. This project sought to explore the use of the Information Systems Research (ISR) framework as guide for the design of mHealth apps.MethodsOur work was guided by the ISR framework which is comprised of 3 cycles: Relevance, Rigor and Design. In the Relevance cycle, we conducted 5 focus groups with 33 targeted end-users. In the Rigor cycle, we performed a review to identify technology-based interventions for meeting the health prevention needs of our target population. In the Design Cycle, we employed usability evaluation methods to iteratively develop and refine mock-ups for a mHealth app.ResultsThrough an iterative process, we identified barriers and facilitators to the use of mHealth technology for HIV prevention for high-risk MSM, developed 'use cases' and identified relevant functional content and features for inclusion in a design document to guide future app development. Findings from our work support the use of the ISR framework as a guide for designing future mHealth apps.DiscussionResults from this work provide detailed descriptions of the user-centered design and system development and have heuristic value for those venturing into the area of technology-based intervention work. Findings from this study support the use of the ISR framework as a guide for future mHealth app development.ConclusionUse of the ISR framework is a potentially useful approach for the design of a mobile app that incorporates end-users' design preferences.Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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