Phase 4: Obtaining Preliminary Feedback From Potential Users

The test session took place in June 2018 with 5 women (aged 51-66 years with a minimum of high school education), who had been diagnosed with breast cancer between 2005 and 2016. Two of the women had a recurrence of cancer since their diagnosis and 2 women previously participated in the focus group of phase 1. The goals of the session were as follows:

To consider women’s responses to existing web-based resources for breast surgery that contain more factual information and to the pilot version of the HERS app presenting experiential information

To gather perspectives on the HERS mobile app regarding what was useful and to gather any recommendations for improvement

The women first explored the information resources offered by the app. These included resources offered by reliable breast cancer organizations such as the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, Canadian Breast Cancer Network, and Canadian Cancer Society. These resources mostly offer what we have termed more biomedical or facts and figures–type information related to breast cancer (eg, illness stages and surgery procedures) and may occasionally include some experiences of women as testimonials. After reading these resources (20 min), the participants completed a questionnaire (15 min). We considered adopting the questions from the eHealth Impact Questionnaire evaluation tool [28] for this study; however, to align the tool with the content and process used in this study, we substantially adapted the questions but retained the 5-point Likert scale. This process was then repeated for the information on the experiential information in the HERS app. The focus group ended with a discussion of the value of biomedical-oriented information resources and experiential app resources.