The Potential of Virtual Real World for Usability Test of Location-Aware Apps

Abstract

Recently, many kinds of location-aware applications of smartphone are developed. However, it is difficult to test them for usability in the same way as the non-location-aware ones because of the test environment. For example, in case of supportive applications for emergency situations, the usability test can be carried out only in normal period of outdoor fields. Key competitive technologies beyond the issues will be Augment Reality and Virtual Reality. We focus on advantages of laboratory experiment and present a usability test environment of location-aware apps based on virtual real world using Google Street View. In this paper, we aim at understanding the weaknesses and strengths of this approach. We developed an initial prototype of the usability test environment and a simple map viewer app. The usability test has two conditions from a designated start point: (c1) go to a designated place and (c2) explore the area freely. We observed two participants’ behaviors: (b1) movement in the virtual real world, (b2) body motion, and (b3) operation of the map viewer app. From the results, we discuss the better ways to collect these data as well as the weakness and strengths of laboratory-based usability test environment. These outcomes spotlight laboratory survey’s strengths of fine grain spatiotemporal data.