Table 3 Recommendations

Educational features

Educational component as part of the app: preferred topics were related to diabetes complications including: end organ damage (e.g. nephropathy, stroke, myocardial infarction) and hypoglycaemic episodes

Nil interest in in-app educational features and preference of information from other sources

Researcher: “What diabetes issues do you think are important for people to have information on?

Participant: “Um, the diabolical effect that diabetes has on your body…Effect on …you know your organs. (Participant 10, 68 year old female, non-app user)

Features that include monitoring and tracking health information

BGL monitoring with trends paired with dynamic tips

Additional self-management tasks: blood pressure monitoring, weight monitoring and activity tracking

Reminders for exercise and appointments

“I’ve got a useless memory and I can’t remember. I wouldn’t be able to remember < BGL > what the um… If I did happen to check multiple times a day, I wouldn’t remember what they were anyway. So I wouldn’t be able to give an average or trend or anything like that. If I had to do it off memory. “(Participant 27, 37 year old male, app user)

Nutritional features

Carbohydrate calculators, diabetes specific recipes or meal suggestions

Diabetes friendly food suggestions, an app that says if a food is/is not suitable for people with diabetes

Researcher:”… and if you were to use an app, what features would you want in the app to make it useful to you?” Participant:” um, the biggest issue is trying to um, decide with a decent menu… yeah. So much stuff out there’s got sugar in it and you’ve got to try to avoid it you know.” (Participant 11, 48 year old male, non-app-user).

Medication reminders

Content with their own medication routine

Medication features, such as an app that allows a medication list to be uploaded or reminds one when it is time to collect a new script (such an app exists and is used by the participant who brought this up)

“I think a feature such as being alerted about your medication, I think could be highly useful. I mean I get messages about these things I have to go to, so that was highly useful.” (Participant 4, 65 year old male, app user)

Text messaging

Weekly text messaging would be an appropriate time frame

“You get sick of seeing it. But if it was weekly one or a fortnightly one or something, then I’d be more likely to read it because I’m not just going to flick it off and get rid of it, so.” (Participant 9, 44 year old male, app user)