I am truly excited to write this first blog post and to welcome you to MindTools.io. This moment also remarks a point where our team is moving forward from a scientific work of two years, done in the back stage, into the public phase.
At MindTools.io, we aim to provide readers with objective and, ultimately, valid information about the use of technological advancements and digital apps to enhance quality of life and wellbeing. In this domain, there are tens of thousands of websites, screeners, apps – most of them are in poor quality – and our first goal is to sort the most promising ones and in this process to learn what it is that makes them better.
In particular, we set ourselves the goal to investigate how different programs could be helpful to users and in which context; and we base the content of this website on our research findings. The team rigorously develop and test different methods – in-house – to rate and filter apps, hoping to pass advancements made at the back stage to researchers, developers, clinicians, and consumers.
Our approach is demonstrated through the development of Enlight, a comprehensive suite of quality ratings which has showed ability to predict which digital products are more engaging in real world use1. In social research, such prediction is defined as “predictive validity” and is considered by many as the most important way to check the performance of developed tools2. More about this research and findings can be found here. As we aim to advance the knowledge in this field, interested researchers and developers can find all the details about Enlight, as well as the references to our findings in our Resource Center.
It seems that every day we learn more about the use of digital tools to enhance quality of life; however, understanding user needs and how different tools might fit these needs challenges our basic assumptions about what does it mean to “be at need”. In future posts I will talk about different review qualities and how we try to provide the most valid data. Meanwhile, I encourage you to look into our website and program reviews. We would also love to hear from you: If you have any suggestions as of how can we make this website better to users, please do not hesitate and contact us.
References
1 Baumel, A., & Yom-Tov, E. (in press). Predicting user adherence to behavioral eHealth interventions in the real world: Examining which aspects of intervention design matter most. Translational Behavioral Medicine.
2 American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education. (2014). Standards for educational and psychological testing (2014 Edition). American Educational Research Association: Washington, DC.