mHealth Design Toolkit - Ten Principles to Launch, Develop and Scale Mobile Health Services in Emerging Markets

This mHealth Design Toolkit is an instrument to provide guidance to the development and implementation of mobile health (mHealth) services. mHealth services are services that provide much-needed information on issues such as balanced diets, early disease detection, immunisation tracking, and everyday healthy living, which are delivered over voice (e.g., interactive voice response (IVR), helplines), text channels (such as short message service, or SMS) and, increasingly, rich media (online content and apps).

Specifically, the toolkit offers a collection of insights, tools, and key principles to increase adoption and customer uptake of mobile health services by involving end-users in the service development process. It seeks to overcome some of the challenges faced by mHealth services in attaining scale and adoption caused by not focusing enough on the users’ needs and the realities they live in. The toolkit therefore provides guidance on how to bring end-users into service development process, helping mHealth providers to build services that truly resonate with their end-users.

The toolkit was developed by the GMSA mHealth Programme in partnership with frog, a global design and strategy firm that specialises in bringing a user-centred design approach into the product development process. The toolkit is the outcome of various user research projects conducted in eight countries: Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. GSMA’s mHealth programme and frog have been working in these countries on an mNutrition initiative to develop and launch mobile health services with a focus on nutrition for pregnant women and young mothers. For this reason, the content and case studies of this toolkit focus mainly on nutrition.

The toolkit is structured according to the 10 Principles learned from experience and research. These include business, design, content, and marketing considerations that each mHealth service should address. The key considerations are:

1. Segmenting customers by gender and age only does not reveal who your users are.
2. A service should be created with the whole community in mind, not just one single user.
3. The aspirations of mHealth services often do not resonate with user aspirations.
4. Nutrition is not scientific; it is subjective and highly cultural.
5. Do not replace human networks with virtual networks.
6. Localising the service does not just mean translating words into local languages.
7. Wording matters, even if it is only 20 characters long.
8. It is not only what you say, but how you say it.
9. Continuous iteration: You will not get your service right the first time.
10. Sustainable revenue will not come only from one source.

Each of these sections offers: a detailed description of each consideration, explaining how mHealth services can conduct user research to address the consideration; stories from the field that help put a specific consideration into context and provide additional suggestions on how to apply it; and suggested questions to ask users and other relevant stakeholders during research.