Table 4.

Description of main themes and subthemes from focus groups.

Themes	Description	Subthemes 1	Description	Subthemes 2	Description
Meaningfulness	Apps need to be designed as meaningful and tailored to young adults.	Risk categories and government recommendations	Young people felt that government guidelines are unrealistic in light of UK drinking cultures.	n/a	n/a
		Information and feedback	Must provide information and feedback which is interesting to young people.	Wellness and lifestyle	Young adults are interested in factors such as weight gain; exercise; calorie and sugar content; impact upon image; junk food and exercise equivalents; costs; physical, psychological, and social impact; positive information; safety tips and sober things to do.
		Information and feedback	See above.	Personalization and tailoring	Information and feedback needs to be tailored to users’ demographics. Users would like to be able to set up own information preferences.
		Information and feedback	See above.	Presentation	Information needs to be succinctly displayed, not wordy, bullet-pointed, easy to read. Users would like the option of information pop-ups.
		Goals	Goals should be meaningful to young people, focus on short-term and long-term health risks and include lifestyle and wellness goals.	Personalization and tailoring	Set own goals and write personalized messages to yourself for motivation. Personalize timings and frequency.
		Goals	See above.	Prompts for goals	Option to set up reminders for goals at important times, eg when on a night out.
		Monitoring	Monitoring features should include a drinks diary and graph.	Drinks Diary	Data should be easy to enter including prompts and reminders; more choices of brands and drinks; barcode scanner.
		Monitoring	See above.	Graphs	Plot other health/well-being information that is relevant to drinking, eg mood; costs, and events.
		Esthetics	Young people wanted an app that was stylish and well-designed, with options to personalize and tailor the look of the app. They also requested the option to set up a user profile.	n/a	n/a
Community	Creating an online community of young people who want to reduce their drinking.	Support and motivation	The most successful way to cut down drinking is with the support of other people. This should be integrated into apps for young people.	n/a	n/a
		Group goals	Feature that allows an individual user to join an online group and work towards a specific goal, eg, “spend less money on alcohol” or “have a drink-free weekend”.	Friends	Users should be able to set goals with groups of friends.
		Group goals	See above.	Online users	Users should have the option to join online groups with a dedicated goal via a goals “forum”.
		Autonomy and privacy	Group goals should be opt-in and users can choose to set up private goals only.	n/a	n/a