The Review of Malaysia Digital Health Service Mobile Applications’ Usability Design

Abstract

Digital health services have become a trend and receive higher demand in Malaysia. However, the adoption of mobile applications to support the digital health service in the country remains low especially among older adults, contributing to low usability support of the mobile applications. This paper reviews the usability models and design factors that are relevant and applicable to support the digital health service mobile applications’ design for older adults. Seven usability design factors such as efficiency, help and documentation, learnability, memorability, user-friendliness, need-base, and push-base were discovered to be most suitable to support older adult users. Subsequently, a review was conducted on the fulfilment of seven usability design factors in key Malaysian digital health service mobile applications. Findings showed that most applications supported high learnability and memorability but lacked support for another five usability factors. Lastly, a usability design framework to support the Malaysia digital health service mobile applications for older adult users would be proposed. A full exploratory study is the next step to validate the proposed framework.