Integrating the Voice of Healthcare Workers in Requirements Elicitation: A Balance Between Rigour and Relevance

Peer support programs (PSPs) are a recognized intervention to help healthcare workers (HCWs) mitigate burnout. These programs are increasingly delivered using information and communication technologies. While technology-enabled PSPs bring advantages such as accessibility, challenges related to communication, perceived lack of safety, and participant engagement hinder their effectiveness. In line with a body of literature on this topic, lacking trust in technologies and other individuals in the programs are at the root of these challenges. We thus aim to understand how technologies used for enabling PSPs could be designed to enhance trust. In this paper, we propose a methodology to identify the meta-requirements and design principles that could guide the design of peer support systems (PSS) to meet this objective. We adopt a design science research (DSR) methodology, which provides principles and a process to move rigorously from guiding theories and frameworks of trust to meta-requirements and design principles. To enhance the relevance of results, we complement this methodology by integrating a prototyping approach that involves HCWs as end users. This approach allows iteratively adapting and refining the results of the research in a manner that reflects HCWs’ priorities and perspectives. This approach provides valuable insights for future research on well-being and health, focusing on identifying user-centred requirements that can be generalized across a class of systems.