HCI Contributions in Mental Health: A Modular Framework to Guide Psychosocial Intervention Design

Abstract

Many people prefer psychosocial interventions for mental health care or other concerns, but these interventions are often complex and unavailable in settings where people seek care. Intervention designers use technology to improve user experience or reach of interventions, and HCI researchers have made many contributions toward this goal. Both HCI and mental health researchers must navigate tensions between innovating on and adhering to the theories of change that guide intervention design. In this paper, we propose a framework that describes design briefs and evaluation approaches for HCI contributions at the scopes of capabilities, components, intervention systems, and intervention implementations. We show how theories of change (from mental health) can be translated into design briefs (in HCI), and that these translations can bridge and coordinate efforts across fields. It is our hope that this framework can support researchers in motivating, planning, conducting, and communicating work that advances psychosocial intervention design.

Keywords: behavioural science; complex interventions; mental health; psychosocial interventions; theory.

Figure 1:

Our proposed framework argues that psycho-social interventions can be seen prescribing ’sets of experiences’ that are expected to lead to psychological effects for the participants …and thus can be translated into design briefs. This figure provides an overview of the four key types of design briefs—at the capability, component, intervention system, and intervention implementation level—that correspond to different functions within an intervention.

Figure 2:

An simplified description of an example theory of change, in the context of a behavioural activation intervention, which is an approach often used to treat depression (cf., [77, 79, 80]).

Figure 3:

A conceptual diagram of how the constraints and expectations on experience trajectories—coming from psychological theories of change, HCI understanding of lived contexts, and the available technical capabilities—can combine in a single design brief.

Figure 4:

An overview of the key properties of the four types of design briefs, with focus on describing the role they play in the intervention development, and the key evaluation criteria associated with each type – a ’crib’ sheet summarising the core messages from the rest of this section.