Velvet Spors
University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
Self-care apps offer a wide variety of different therapy paradigms, pedagogies and concepts for people to maintain and make sense of their mental health. However, as human-made artefacts, these apps are being imbued with their designers' interests, opinions, biases and assumptions about self-care. This paper is interested in making these (often) implicit notions visible. After selecting 69 apps from the Google Play Store, we use Feminist Content Analysis to investigate the store descriptions of these apps: Inductively through thematic analysis and deductively through charting concepts found within the descriptions. Our findings indicate that commercial self-care apps portray themselves as "future creating" tools for individual self-discovery, but they also create narratives that propagate an overly simplistic, individualist and potentially harmful view of mental distress. We conclude this paper by sketching out alternative design considerations for how self-care apps can portray themselves and communicate in a more transparent, plurality-embracing fashion.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445500
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)