Since the release of the first mobile devices, the usability of on-board applications has been the concern not only of software vendors but hardware manufacturers as well. The academia community later willingly joined the discussion on usability in terms of theory and empirical measurement, having experience and knowledge in desktop settings. At first sight, such a background should guarantee a solid foundation to conduct research on software usability in a new setting. However, a preliminary study on the subject matter revealed methodological disorder in contemporary literature. As a matter of fact, a need emerged to review existing usability definitions, attributes and measures to recognize all associated aspects. In order to fill this void, we conducted a systematic literature review on usability studies indexed by the Scopus database and devoted to mobile applications. The input volume covers 790 documents from 2001 to 2018. The data analysis shows that the ISO 9241–11 usability definition has been adopted in an unchanged form and popularized as the standard by the HCI community. Secondly, in total, 75 attributes were identified and analysed. The most frequent are efficiency (70%), satisfaction (66%) and effectiveness (58%), which directly originate from the above definition. Subsequently, the less frequent are learnability (45%), memorability (23%), cognitive load (19%) and errors (17%). The last two concern simplicity (13%) and ease of use (9%). Thirdly, in the evaluation of usability, controlled observation and surveys are two major research methods applied, while eye-tracking, thinking aloud and interview are hardly used and serve as complementary to collect additional data. Moreover, usability evaluations are often confused with user experience dimensions, covering not only application quality characteristics, but also user beliefs, emotions and preferences. All these results indicate the need for further research on the usability of mobile applications, aiming to establish a consensus in the theory and practice among all interested parties.

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Usability of Mobile Applications: A Systematic Literature Study

Recently, use of mobile communicational devices in field data collection is increasing such as smart phones and cellular phones due to emergence of embedded Global Position System GPS and Wi-Fi Internet access. Accurate timely and handy field data collection is required for disaster management and emergency quick responses. In this article, we introduce web-based GIS system to collect the field data by personal mobile phone through Post Office Protocol POP3 mail server. The main objective of this work is to demonstrate real-time field data collection method to the students using their mobile phone to collect field data by timely and handy manners, either individual or group survey in local or global scale research.

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Web-based GIS System for Real-time Field Data Collection Using Personal Mobile Phone

Handheld device applications with poor usability can reduce the productivity of users and incur costs for businesses, thus usability testing should play a vital role in application development Conventional usability testing methodologies, such as formal user testing, can be expensive, time consuming and labour intensive; less resource-demanding alternatives can yield unreliable results Automating aspects of usability testing would improve its efficiency and make it more practical to perform throughout development

An automated usability testing tool should capture as input the properties of an application's graphical user interface, the sequence of user actions as they use the application to achieve particular tasks, their behaviour and comments, as well as a description of these tasks The tool should evaluate both the static and dynamic properties of the interface, examine navigational burden and suggest modifications or templates that would improve usability Results should be quick and easy to interpret, and be understandable by personnel other than specialised testers

Several existing tools that are typical of the tools available today meet some but not all of these requirements In this paper we describe the design of the HUIA testing framework, in which we have to meet as many of these requirements as possible

Automated usability testing framework

More than just meet the functional requirements, software is expected to promote a good user experience to its users. However, to achieve an adequate degree of user experience, it is necessary to understand users, their needs and expectations very well. Currently, part of the software industry focuses on developing mobile Web applications. A significant difficulty in the design of this type of application is that the development team often does not have a clear group of target users available, with whom the team could use traditional techniques for eliciting requirements such as interviews and questionnaires. Therefore, it is necessary to use different techniques that allow an immersion in the needs and characteristics of users, even when the users are not directly involved in the development. One of these techniques that help thinking of the target users of the application is the Persona technique. An important criticism of the Personas technique is that it does not always help design the solution for real users' needs. This perception of a low degree of usefulness limits the acceptance and adoption of the technique. To address these concerns, this paper presents the PATHY (Persona empathy) technique, which assists designers and developers in thinking about the target users' goals and characteristics, as well as the application characteristics to help users achieve their goals. This paper also discusses the results of a preliminary study, presenting the analysis of personas generated using the PATHY technique and a new version of the technique improved from this analysis.

Eliciting Requirements Using Personas and Empathy Map to Enhance the User Experience

This paper evaluates the Human Affect Recording Tool (HART), a Computer Assisted Direct Observation (CADO) application that facilitates scientific sampling. HART enforces an established method for systematic direct observation in Educational Data Mining (EDM) research, the Baker Rodrigo Ocumpaugh Monitoring Protocol [25] [26]. This examination provides insight into the design of HART for rapid data collection for both formative classroom assessment and educational research. It also discusses the possible extension of these tools to other domains of affective computing and human computer interaction.

http://www.columbia.edu/~rsb2162/SigDoc2015.pdf

HART: the human affect recording tool

It is envisaged that, particularly in African countries under the NEPAD initiative, mobile technology will play a crucial rote in the collection and maintenance of spatial information about the country's infrastructure (i.e. water, electricity, roads, communication networks etc). While much of the underlying technology may already be available, usability of the mobile applications remains a serious concern. This work investigates the usability of a mobile application for field data collection in the utility industry. The purpose of the investigation is to gain better understanding of usability requirements for a mobile field data collection application but more importantly, how to meet these requirements from a usability engineering standpoint. Firstly, we give some background information on mobile computing and its role in field data collection. Secondly, we describe the design and implementation of the field data collection prototype. The analysis of usability requirements is based on a field study of underground utility closure sourcing work employed at a telecommunications utility. A usage-centered design approach is used to design the user interface, which is implemented as a working prototype on a pocket computer. And finally, we discuss the usability testing of the prototype.

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K.H. Moe

Papers

Designing a usable mobile application for field data collection