Needs and Challenges of Personal Data Visualisations in Mobile Health Apps: User Survey

TL;DR

This study surveys mobile health app users to identify their needs, preferences, and challenges with personal data visualisations, providing guidelines to improve user satisfaction and future research directions.

Contribution

It offers empirical insights into user preferences and challenges in mobile health data visualisation, and proposes design guidelines based on survey results.

Findings

Bar and pie charts are most preferred for health data visualization.

Users favor a mix of text and charts with explanations.

Main challenges include data overload, overlapping text, and unhelpful visualizations.

Abstract

Personal data visualisations are becoming a critical contributor toward the successful adoption of mobile health (m-health) apps. Thus, understanding user needs and challenges when using mobile personal data visualisation is essential to ensuring the adoption of these apps. This paper presents the results of a user survey to understand users' demographics, tasks, needs, and challenges of using mobile personal data visualisations. We had 56 complete responses. The survey's key findings are: 1) 51\% of the users use multiple health tracking apps to achieve their goals/needs; 2) bar charts and pie charts are the most favourable charts to view health data; 3) users prefer to visualise their data using a mix of text and charts - explanation is essential. Furthermore, the top three challenges reported by the participants are: too much data displayed, overlapping text, and visualisations are not helpful in information exploration. On the other hand, users' top three encouragement factors are easy-to-read presented data, easy to navigate, and quality data are shown in the chart. Furthermore, fun and curiosity are the primary drivers of m-health tracking apps. Finally, based on survey results, we propose data visualisation designing and developing guidelines that should avoid the reported challenges and ensure user satisfaction. In future work, we plan to contextualise our study and investigate the pain and gain of data visualised in the following m-health domains: sports activities, heart monitoring, blood pressure, sleeping pattern, and eating habits.