Participatory and Culturally Appropriate Design
Our foundational methods for designing the HealthyMe/MiSalud app are health literacy, user participation, and data science. This means that we actively work with African American and Hispanic adults, our potential users, to make the app easy to understand and use. We asked people to use an early version of the app and tell us what they liked and didn’t like and how it worked. We used that feedback to improve the app.
We use data science methods to create the features in the app and the computer algorithm that personalizes people’s experiences with the app. The algorithm was built with data collected from African American and Hispanic adults who responded to an online survey.
Here is an example of our participatory design. We asked participants to create collages with words and images to express their ideas for the app.
