Mobile Application Usability: Heuristic Evaluation and Evaluation of Heuristics

Ger Joyce, Mariana Lilley, Trevor Barker, and Amanda Jefferies, 'Mobile Application Usability: Heuristic Evaluation and Evaluation of Heuristics', paper presented at AHFE 2016 International Conference on Human Factors, Software, and Systems Engineering. Walt Disney World, Florida USA, 27-31 July 2016Many traditional usability evaluation methods do not consider mobile-specific issues. This can result in mobile applications that abound in usability issues. We empirically evaluate three sets of usability heuristics for use with mobile applications, including a set defined by the authors. While the set of heuristics defined by the authors surface more usability issues in a mobile application than other sets of heuristics, improvements to the set can be made

Heuristic Evaluation of Play4Fit Health and Fitness App: A Comparison Between Experts and Novices Evaluators

Heuristic evaluation (HE) can be used to effectively identify usability issues in various interfaces. However, it has not been widely used in evaluating smartphone apps, especially in the health and fitness domain. One reason is the lack of HCI experts, which makes incorporating HE into the design process difficult. This paper presents the results of a study that compared HE performed by three HCI experts and three novices in evaluating a gamification app for health and fitness on a smartphone. The study used Smartphone Mobile Application heuRisTics (SMART), which focuses on smartphone apps, and a severity rating scale to determine the severity of the usability issues. These issues were mapped to the SMART heuristic. The findings indicate that novices may identify usability issues that the experts overlooked. While the experts identified eighteen usability issues, the novices found only four; however, the novice’s findings may be used as a substitute for HE when experts are unavailable. Both experts and novices identified two similar usability issues, but their severity ratings differed. One possible solution to address the lack of usability issues identified by novices in HE is to use more novices instead of experts in the evaluation process

Heuristic Evaluation of Play4Fit Health and Fitness App: A Comparison Between Experts and Novices Evaluators

Heuristic evaluation (HE) can be used to effectively identify usability issues in various interfaces. However, it has not been widely used in evaluating smartphone apps, especially in the health and fitness domain. One reason is the lack of HCI experts, which makes incorporating HE into the design process difficult. This paper presents the results of a study that compared HE performed by three HCI experts and three novices in evaluating a gamification app for health and fitness on a smartphone. The study used Smartphone Mobile Application heuRisTics (SMART), which focuses on smartphone apps, and a severity rating scale to determine the severity of the usability issues. These issues were mapped to the SMART heuristic. The findings indicate that novices may identify usability issues that the experts overlooked. While the experts identified eighteen usability issues, the novices found only four; however, the novice’s findings may be used as a substitute for HE when experts are unavailable. Both experts and novices identified two similar usability issues, but their severity ratings differed. One possible solution to address the lack of usability issues identified by novices in HE is to use more novices instead of experts in the evaluation process

Incorporating Heuristic Evaluation (HE) in the Evaluation of Visual Design of the Eco-Tourism Smartphone App

Heuristic Evaluation (HE) has proven to be important in the development of different computer systems but has not been incorporated in the development of eco-tourism smartphone applications. This results inusability issues that significantly affect user experience (UX) as discussed in literature. This study reports the HE in the design and development of Niranur Agro Farm (NAF) eco-tourism smartphone applications, which could improve UX. Eight experts participated in this study, utilizing the SMART mobile usability heuristic developed for mobile application and the severity rating scale to determine usability issues. The HE findings indicated that 22 usability issues were identified. One issue was rated 4 (catastrophe), four issues were rated 3 (major problem), twelve issues were rated 2 (minor problem) and five issues were rated 1 (cosmetics). Although there are issues rated as 4 and 3, the majority of the issues were considered to be minor (1 and 2 on the scale). Results indicated that it is crucial to incorporate HE into the design and development of the eco-tourism smartphone app to minimize the usability issues faced by users. It further validated that utilizing a specific heuristic for smartphone applications would ensure that all usability issues are correctly categorized and remedied

Heuristic Evaluation and Usability Testing of G-MoMo Applications

Financial technology (FinTech) has swiftly revolutionized mobile money as one of the ways of accessing financial services in developing countries. Numerous mobile money applications were developed to access mobile money services but are hindered by severe authentication security challenges, thus, forcing the researchers to design a secure multi-factor authentication (MFA) algorithm for mobile money applications. Three prototypes of native mobile money applications (G-MoMo applications) were developed to confirm that the algorithm provides high security and is feasible. This study, therefore, aimed to evaluate the usability of the G-MoMo applications using heuristic evaluation and usability testing to identify potential usability issues and provide recommendations for improvement. Heuristic evaluation and usability testing methods were used to evaluate the G-MoMo applications. The heuristic evaluation was carried out by five experts that used the 10 principles proposed by Jakob Nielsen with a five-point severity rating scale to identify the usability problems. While the usability testing was conducted with forty participants selected using a purposive sampling method to validate the usability of the G-MoMo applications by performing tasks and filling out the post-test questionnaire. Data collected were analyzed in RStudio software. Sixty-three usability issues were identified during heuristic evaluation, where 33 were minor and 30 were major. The most violated heuristic items were “help and documentation”, and “user control and freedom”, while the least violated heuristic items were “aesthetic and minimalist design” and “visibility of system status”. The usability testing findings revealed that the G-MoMo applications’ performance proved good in learnability, effectiveness, efficiency, memorability, and errors. It also provided user satisfaction, ease of use, aesthetics, usefulness, integration, and understandability. Therefore, it was highly recommended that the developers of G-MoMo applications fix the identified usability problems to make the applications more reliable and increase overall user satisfaction.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Available approaches to heuristic evaluation of smart-phone applications

Abstract. Usability heuristics are a lightweight tool for finding usability problems in a piece of software. These heuristics can be used for any kind of software, from desktop applications to web sites to games and to smart-phone applications. With the rise of smart phones and applications developed for them there has been a need to update the approach of heuristic evaluation to consider the limitations and new possibilities brought by smart-phone applications, when compared to more traditional desk-top applications. In this bachelor’s thesis different these issues are discussed, and along this several lists of usability heuristics were identified and listed. In addition to listing out the current research on smart-phone application heuristics, these lists were compared against the issues that are specific to smart-phone applications. Research questions in this thesis are as follows: RQ1: What guidelines / usability heuristics can be found that specifically target mobile device user interfaces? RQ2: How do these heuristic lists consider the difficulties faced by smart-phone applications

User-centered design of the interface prototype of a business intelligence mobile application

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão IndustrialIn a society in constant technological evolution, companies try to equip themselves with tools that allow them to achieve, or maintain, the leadership position in the markets in which they compete in. Success often lies in the ability to exploit the existent Business Intelligence (BI) in the best possible way. Moreover, mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets assume themselves as elements with an increasingly preponderant use in the everyday life. In the convergence of these two factors, emerges the need to develop mobile “management facilitators”, capable of providing companies’ workers the access to BI, anywhere and at a few touches distance. To make this possible, not only does the correct information needs to be selected, but also organized and presented in a highly intuitive and easy to use way. It’s in this context that the work present in this dissertation emerges: User-Centered Design of the interface prototype of a Business Intelligence mobile application for a company in the retail industry. Thus, the goal of this dissertation resides in the development of an adequate interface, through the continuous interaction with a group of representative users in activities such as users’ needs assessment, interface design, heuristic evaluation and usability tests. From meetings with the users, 29 needs were identified for the BI application. These needs were later converted into functional requirements which originated two prototypes, one for smartphones and the other for tablets. These were subjected to a heuristic evaluation and tested through the application of the Cognitive Walkthrough method to representative users, to collect performance and satisfaction metrics. It was concluded that the designed interfaces were in accordance with 14 of the 16 heuristics, which led to three modifications on the interfaces. The Cognitive Walkthrough results showed that the interfaces are intuitive since all the tasks were completed with 100% success, in reasonable times and with a number of actions close to the ideal

The Development of a Point of Care Clinical Guidelines Mobile Application Following a User-Centred Design Approach

This paper describes the development of a point of care clinical guidelines mobile application. A user-centred design approach was utilised to inform the design of a smartphone application, this included: Observations; a survey; focus groups and an analysis of popular apps utilised by clinicians in a UK NHS Trust. Usability testing was conducted to inform iterations of the application, which presents clinicians with a variety of integrated tools to aid in decision making and information retrieval. The study found that clinicians use a mixture of technology to retrieve information, which is often inefficient or has poor usability. It also shows that smartphone application development for use in UK hospitals needs to consider the variety of users and their clinical knowledge and work pattern. This study highlights the need for applying user-centred design methods in the design of information presented to clinicians and the need for clinical information delivery that is efficient and easy to use at the bedside

Set of usability heuristics for quality assessment of mobile applications on smartphones

The innovations proposed by the cell phone market have grown steadily in recent years, along with the increasing complexity of the hardware, operating systems, and applications available in this market. These changes bring new challenges related to usability that need to be considered during the development process of these applications since the new forms of user-application interactions increasingly require adapting the behavior of smartphone users. In this situation, usability is an important issue that depends on factors such as the Users, their characteristics and abilities, the Task which the users intend to achieve and also the application usage Context. This work presents a systematic literature review with the objective of identifying the heuristics and usability metrics used in the literature and/or industry. Based on the review results, this work presents another contribution with a proposal of a set of usability heuristics focused in mobile applications on smartphones, considering the User, Task and Context as usability factors and Cognitive Load as an important attribute of usability. The components of this set are detailed in a model intended to be used in empirical validations allowing to dynamically incorporate improvements to the proposal

Web usability guidelines for smartphones : a synergic approach

The mobile phones that we carry with us all the time have started becoming increasingly sophisticated and consequently are referred to as “Smartphones”. Smartphones today are extremely powerful and, in addition to making phone calls, are capable of performing a variety of other functions. One very important function is the ability to access the Internet for a wide number of purposes. An obstacle that these users face is that access to the Internet is through a tiny interface, which is in sharp contrast to the typically large, flat-screen monitor. Unfortunately, many websites are neither designed for nor suitable to be accessed from these small devices. With relatively little effort, however, the developers of the websites can make the web interfaces more appropriate for Smartphones and hence accessible to a much larger audience. In this paper, we focus on “web usability”, a term essentially concerned with the ease of accessing and entering information on websites. We compile and synergize several different guidelines with the intent of increasing the web usability of Smartphones