SereneMind: Design and Evaluation of a Persuasive Mobile App for Managing Stress Among Adults

Stress is a global public health problem that leads to severe physical and psychological health risks if not managed. Various stress management interventions have been delivered using mobile health (mHealth) apps. Although there are different existing mobile apps promoting stress-coping strategies, more work is still needed to design and evaluate such apps from a persuasion standpoint. Persuasive mobile apps incorporate persuasive strategies (PS) that work as backbone mechanics to motivate desired behaviour change. Therefore, we design and evaluate a mobile app called SereneMind following a five-step process. First, we deconstruct the PS operationalized in 150 stress management apps from both Google Play and App Store to identify the most implemented PS using the Persuasive Systems Design (PSD) framework. Second, we design a low-fidelity prototype (LFP) depicting various features of the app based on the top ten PS. Third, we conduct a user study involving our target audience to evaluate the perceived persuasiveness/effectiveness of each feature and uncover further improvement based on users' feedback. Fourth, based on our findings from the LFP evaluation, we design a high-fidelity prototype (HFP) using only the features that were perceived as effective by our target audience and applying user suggestions to refine the prototypes. Finally, we run a usability study to evaluate the HFP. Our results show that participants perceived SereneMind as usable and useful for managing stress. Therefore, it is more likely to be adopted and used. Lastly, we offer design recommendations for stress management apps in line with our findings.