Mindfulness Mobile App User Quality Evaluation: Mars Scale Adaptation

Attention to mindfulness has growntremendously during the past few years, notably in the domains of psychologyand medicine. Since the early 2000s, there has been an unprecedented developmentin communication, information, and internet technology, resulting indigitalization of the mainstream activities. It is possible to enhance humanwell-being via smartphone applications. The findings of the pertinant literaturereveal the effectiveness of these applications on stress reduction thusconsidering the impact on human health, evaluating the quality of theseapplications is of great importance. The findings of literature reviewdelineate that the current studies are characterized by expert qualityevaluations where the most frequently used quality evaluation tool is theMobile Application Rating Scale (MARS). To the best of the authors’ knowledge,the literature lacks the measurement of mobile application quality from theuser perspective and MARS consists of items that measure the quality from the expertperspective. Therefore, the objective of this study is to adapt MARS to enableusers to evaluate the quality performance of mindfulness mobile applications. Datais collected via questionnaires which are conducted to the users of mindfulnessmobile applications. The study is expected to be a pioneer effort in applying amobile application quality evaluation scale to end users and given the recentpopularity of mindfulness apps, this study is expected to contribute to theliterature and business practices in terms of understanding the userperspective of these applications’ quality evaluations.