Automated and unsupervised user interaction logging as basis for usability evaluation of mobile applications

  • Authors:

  • Florian Lettner;Clemens Holzmann

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg, Austria;University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg, Austria

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Advances in Mobile Computing & Multimedia
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

The evaluation of mobile user interfaces can be a tedious task, especially if usability tests under real-world conditions should be performed. In particular, the evaluation of high-fidelity prototypes provides valuable measures about the quality of mobile applications, which helps designers to identify potentials of improvement for the next revision. Due to their costs or missing expert knowledge evaluation techniques such as cognitive walkthroughs or heuristic evaluation are often not used. Additionally, commercial frameworks provide insufficient details on usability as they only address commercial statistics regarding user loyalty, in-app purchases or demographics. In this paper, we present a novel approach and toolkit for automated and unsupervised evaluation of mobile applications that, in contrast to existing frameworks, is able to trace any user interaction during the entire lifecycle of an application. As a major novelty, our toolkit can be added to mobile applications without changing application source code, which makes it flexible and scalable for all types of applications. Also, our toolkit is able to identify and visualize design flaws such as navigational errors or efficiency for mobile applications.