Userbility: A technique for the evaluation of user experience and usability on mobile applications

Abstract

User eXperience (UX) covers the relationship between usability, context of use, and user emotions regarding an application. Improving the UX and usability of an application, especially mobile applications, can influence their acceptance by end users. Although UX and usability evaluations focus on improving the quality of these applications, the software industry performs these evaluations separately. Based on this, we proposed Userbility, a technique for evaluating UX and usability in mobile applications. This technique is based on two methods: the Heuristic Evaluation and 3E method. In order to evaluate the Userbility technique, we conducted a study through the evaluation of five mobile applications. The results of this study show that it is possible to identify improvements in applications through a UX and usability inspection conducted with Userbility and a new version Userbility.