Changing the Wheels on a Moving Car: Leveraging a Content Management System to Develop an Extensible Digital Intervention

Drug use among higher education students is a pertinent public health issue, with around a quarter of students reporting current use of an illicit drug. MyUSE is an algorithmic, digitally delivered intervention aimed at reducing harms from drug use among higher education students. While many digital interventions around this topic exist, previous work has failed to employ behavioral science in a systematic way. MyUSE focuses on user-centered design (UCD), targeting relevant behavioral changes which are translated into digitally delivered components. This paper describes the challenges of working in an interdisciplinary project team and presents the software-based solutions applied to overcome them. The methodology described demonstrates how sharing the implementation workload can promote synergistic interdisciplinary work in parallel. By providing a flexible centralized platform to manage content and ideas, certain technical requirements become clearly defined and addressed