Digital Contraception Apps Fail Regularly, but Users Keep Coming Back
A new study of 27 contraception app users reveals that unplanned pregnancies and emergency contraception use are common—yet most continue relying on the technology. The research challenges the industry's focus on preventing failures, suggesting that users actually expect problems and develop workarounds, raising questions about how health-critical apps should be designed and regulated.
Originaltitel: When Things Don’t Go As Planned with Digital Contraception.
We present a qualitative interview study that examines what happens when things do not go as planned with digital contraception. Through an analysis of 27 interviews with ongoing users of digital contraception at the time of the study, we convey participants’ accounts of their experiences regarding unplanned pregnancies or use of emergency contraception to avoid an unplanned pregnancy. Our analysis considers participants’ sense-making processes, and notably how they attended to questions of risk and responsibility. Finally, we depict how these participants came to continue using digital contraception after these experiences. Our study connects to ongoing conversations on technological failures in personal informatics and safety-critical systems. We emphasise that failure and success should not be used as a binary classification of long-term users’ relationships with self-tracking technology, which are intimate and critical. Rather, the sustained relation with an intimate technology is composed by several ‘failures’ which are interpreted, acted upon, and, ultimately, overcome.