Evaluating mobileapp usability: A holistic quality approach

Abstract

As newer-generation smartphones enhance functionalities, interactions and services become more complex, leading to usability issues that are increasingly critical and challenging. Also mobile apps have several particular features that pose challenges evaluating their usability using current quality models, usability views, and their relations with target and context entities. With respect to the current literature, usability, actual usability, and user experience are poorly related to target entities (e.g. system and system in use) and context entities, to quality views (e.g. external quality and quality in use), in addition to measurement and evaluation building blocks. In this paper, we propose a holistic quality approach for evaluating usability and user experience of mobile apps. Practical use of our strategy is demonstrated through evaluation for the Facebook mobile app from the system usability viewpoint. Ultimately, a usability evaluation strategy should help designers to understand usability problems effectively and produce better design solutions so we analyze in the context of the framework’s applicability toward this goal.