WHIRLWell Mobile App
The WHIRLWell mobile app was created for Dr. Amie Gordon, who leads the WHIRLab in LSA Psychology. Dr. Gordon observed that many research studies in her field involve delivering scheduled surveys to study participants and requiring participants to complete these surveys within specific timeframes. In the past, text messaging has been used to send participants reminders to complete surveys at specified times, but the tools to do this can be both cumbersome and costly. Dr. Gordon wanted to create a mobile app that research participants could use to register for studies and then receive notifications when surveys related to these studies are available. This would additionally allow users to manage their study participation directly from within the app, as well as giving them the option to indicate their relationships with other study participants, which is especially important in studies looking into relationship development and dynamics.
We worked with Dr. Gordon to define the requirements of this app and then build an initial version. This initial version allowed users to register for studies, complete an onboarding survey for each study, get notifications when surveys for these studies were available to be completed along with a link to the survey to be completed, and specify their relationship with other app users via a user code. The RSE team set up a database to provide the list of studies and associated surveys, so new studies and surveys could be added at any time without the need to update the app itself. In this initial version, surveys could be scheduled based on specific study days and times, at randomized times on specific study days, or at specific times on set days of the week.
Following a successful round of testing with this initial version, Dr. Gordon made the app available to other researchers to use for their studies. This brought up the need for more flexible scheduling options for survey delivery (e.g. randomized times on specific days of the week, randomized times on randomized weekdays), as well as the need to accommodate a larger number of surveys per study than was previously possible. The RSE team revised the app to incorporate a much wider range of scheduling options and a higher number of surveys per study, and the app was subsequently used by multiple researchers to deliver survey-based studies.
We're currently in the process of doing another round of updates on this app to increase reliability and usability based on further user feedback, with the goal of creating an app that can be widely shared and used to deliver these types of surveys.
