Importance of Guidance
Throughout the interviews, the participants regularly highlighted the importance of receiving guidance within the app. Specifically, they mentioned the importance of clarity and meaning regarding the tasks that the app asked them to do:I also thought it was nice that you kind of knew in the morning “ah today is a day with a big survey,” so that you could already plan “okay, today there are maybe a little bit more push messages coming in and I have to pay a little bit more attention.”The importance of guidance was also manifested as the need for a better overview of the participants’ journey during the study. For instance, some participants would have liked more background information about the study to better understand the timeline or the reasons behind receiving certain tasks:And otherwise maybe somehow a little bit more background information about what—why am I being asked these questions, so that I can see even more behind this algorithm and behind this concept and then it would become clearer to me why the same questions keep coming. So, a little bit, so even more background knowledge.Although guidance was acknowledged as important, too much direction was also perceived as overwhelming, for example, very frequent push notifications:Was that now at 10 o’clock, at 12 o’clock or at 2 o’clock, I do not remember any more in which intervals the push messages came in. At the end, I no longer knew at what point I had I received the last push notification—there, I lost overview.