Designing for Engagement in Digital Mental Health Services

Technology can widen access to mental health treatments, but digital mental health interventions (DMHIs) frequently have low engagement and high drop-out rates.Understanding user engagement with DMHIs can help researchers support long-term mental health behavior change through technology.Clinical researchers are leading DMHI projects, including design, and increasingly collaborating with HCI researchers.However, differences in how they operationalize engagement result in misalignment and deprioritization of designing for engagement.My preliminary study explored clinical researchers' perspectives on engagement and how they operationalize it.Findings identified engagement dimensions to consider when creating DMHIs.Service Design could be a framework to integrate each engagement dimension into a user-centered DMHI.My main study will explore one of the dimensions of engagement that researchers identified as a challenge, "invisible engagement."My dissertation will expand on the understanding of engagement and support digital mental health researchers in better designing for engagement in DMHIs.