Aspect-oriented approach for user interaction logging of iOS applications

Abstract

Mobile applications that don’t meet the users’ expectations regarding usability risk bad user feedbacks that lower the application’s download rate or the app will just be quietly ignored. In order to identify and improve major usability issues of a mobile application, data about the real user interaction in the actual mobile usage context needs to be gathered without disturbing the interaction environment. This paper presents an aspect-oriented approach for gathering user interaction data for iOS applications without any additional hardware. To that end, two libraries have been developed that track the user and system behavior, take screenshots, record user videos and collect GPS coordinates. The data can later be downloaded from the mobile device to third party tools for further analysis. A usability test with a sample application shows the possibilities of the implemented framework.