An Experimental Study on Usability and User Experience Evaluation Techniques in Mobile Applications

Abstract

Usability and User Experience (UX) are two quality attributes of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) relevant to the software development process. Thus, to verify the quality of a system, researchers and developers investigate this area, resulting in different Usability and UX evaluation techniques to improve the quality of applications. However, most of them verify only one of these criteria, being necessary, in many cases, to use more than one technique to evaluate an application in both aspects. Therefore, this research aims to present an experimental study to compare the efficiency, effectiveness, and acceptance of two inspection techniques, Userbility and UX-Tips, which jointly evaluate the Usability and UX of mobile applications. In this way, 99 volunteer participants used the techniques to identify defects in two mobile applications. After the evaluation, the participants answered an acceptance questionnaire about the techniques used. The quantitative comparison results show that the techniques have no significant difference regarding efficiency and effectiveness. However, in terms of participant acceptance, Userbility achieved higher rates of usefulness and future usage intentions, while UX-Tips achieved better rates related to ease of use.