User-centered Design of the eyeGuide: A Tailored Glaucoma Behavior Change Program

Purpose: We employed user-centered design to refine a prototype of the eyeGuide, a novel, tailored behavior change program intended to improve medication adherence among glaucoma patients. Patients: Glaucoma patients age 40 years and above prescribed >= 1 glaucoma medication were included. Methods: The eyeGuide consists of tailored educational content and tailored testimonials in which patients share how they were able to overcome barriers to improve their medication adherence. A hybrid of semistructured diagnostic and pretesting interviews were used to refine the content of the eyeGuide. Purposeful sampling was used to recruit a study population representative of the glaucoma patient population. Interviews were conducted until thematic saturation was reached. Interviews were audiorecorded and transcribed verbatim. Three researchers analyzed the transcripts, generated a codebook, and identified key themes using NVivo 10.0 to further refine the eyeGuide. Results: Twenty-one glaucoma patients were interviewed; mean age 72 +/- 12.4 years, 5 (24%) African Americans, 9 (43%) with poor self-reported adherence, 10 (47.6%) age 75 years and above, 10 (47.6%) with poor vision, and 9 (42.9%) women. Qualitative analysis identified 5 important themes for improving glaucoma self-management: social support, patient-provider relationship, medication routine, patients' beliefs about disease and treatment, and eye drop instillation. All participants expressed satisfaction with in-person delivery of the eyeGuide and preferred this to a Web-based module. Participant feedback resulted in revised content. Conclusions: User-centered design generated improvements in the eyeGuide that would not have been possible without patient input. Participants expressed satisfaction with the tailored content.