There are increasing concerns that digital interventions in healthcare settings could be better designed for scalable and sustained use. Implementation science is the scientific study of how to embed evidence-based interventions in practice. Calls to integrate implementation science and Human-Centred Design methods have focused on integrating design methods within implementation science processes. By contrast, we present a novel approach to integrating implementation science within Human-Centred Design for digital health interventions. Our approach leverages the socio-technical Nonadoption, abandonment, scale-up, spread, and sustainability (NASSS) framework within the distinct phases of the Double Diamond process. To illustrate our proposal we demonstrate its application in the redesign of a brief health promotion intervention to reduce the risk of alcohol-attributable breast cancer in women attending routine mammography. We discuss reflections on the approach and implications for future research that targets implementation within design.

While online parenting interventions have been shown to improve youth mental health, parents find it challenging to engage with and implement strategies from self-directed interventions. Our study purposefully designed a parent peer-support community for parents seeking support. Our two-phased qualitative study included parent interviews and design workshops. Our findings show that while parents need others’ lived experiences to learn about parenting, perceived judgment and self-doubt can stop them from actively contributing to the peer support group. To address this design challenge, we operationalised parents’ needs and challenges gained in the interviews and workshops into design implications. We demonstrate a parent-centered design approach where we formulate design implications that integrate parents’ needs and expectations with multidisciplinary theoretical and empirical evidence to deepen and concretise the design for an online parent peer-support community that cultivates empathy, encourages confidence and self-efficacy, and motivates change and growth.

University students are well known for volunteering within non-governmental organisations (NGOs). A significant part of NGO practice is the production of documents that communicate their work to local communities and international stakeholders. However, organisations often struggle to resource translations of these documents, resulting in the exclusion of the very same communities that they want to reach. Although many students are multilingual and are willing to volunteer their time and language skills, there are few structured opportunities configured for such non-professional translation of content in the short-term mode that would fit into the student pattern of availability. We developed Action Translate to specifically support these motivated, non-professional translators within the volunteering constraints of university life. Action Translate leverages machine translation post-editing to support teams of volunteers working on NGO translation projects online. Through analysis of a real-world deployment, we discuss how digital systems can be developed to better support student volunteer translators, specifically in building collegiate interaction and identity as translators for a cause.

School refusal is a complex issue which typically develops in adolescence, often in the context of anxiety and depressive disorders. While parents and educators play a critical role in supporting these adolescents, they need guidance to work together to overcome the problem. Our study explores how technology can be designed to help parents and educators work together in supporting adolescents who refuse school. We first conducted 14 interviews with parents which highlighted that empathic understanding and communication between parents and the educators is key to supporting adolescents with school refusal. Subsequently, we conducted co-design workshops with three parents, three adolescents and five educators. Our workshop findings show that reactive and problem-focused communication can undermine trust-building and progress towards supporting the adolescent. Drawing on these findings, we formulate design implications that can enable empathic parent-adolescent-educator partnerships, provide holistic support for parents, and facilitate individual tailoring for diverse parent-adolescent journeys.

Community-based migrant organizations play a vital role in the provision of welfare services to temporary migrant workers, international students, and refugees whose access to government support services are limited. Through a co-design based inquiry, we explored the potential to utilize mainstream digital platforms to support the welfare agenda of an Australia-based Filipino migrant organization. We discuss the advantages and disadvantages of implementing such technology-mediated workflows within the community-based organization and the essential practices that they may undermine. Drawing on this case study, we present a provisional set of reflections for design practitioners working in the space of migrant communities and other marginalized community groups. These include the importance of designing for the community’s long-term and holistic development, leveraging volunteers’ digital literacy, and a call for more malleable platforms that allow community groups to reflect their core values and needs directly onto the platform configurations.