A novel approach for usability evaluation of mobile applications

Abstract

Mobile applications (apps) have been massively developed and released in recent years. In this competitive market, the users’ adoption of the app or satisfaction greatly depends on its usability. Therefore, tech companies and app developers are looking for quick and easy approaches to evaluate the usability of their products early in the design cycle. The objective of this study was to introduce a novel approach combining the capabilities of the gesture-level model (GLM) and heuristic evaluation to assess the usability of mobile apps in early stages of the design cycle and without the need for costly and time-consuming user testing. The approach can be run on a graphical user interface and includes uncertainties regarding user skill level and distraction. Preliminary results suggested that this approach can be used for usability evaluation of mobile apps; however, its validity and generalizability to other domains need to be validated in the future with human-subject experiments.