EVALUATING THE USABILITY OF MOBILE APPLICATIONS WITHOUT AFFECTING THE USER AND THE USAGE CONTEXT

Abstract

Reliable usability evaluation results are crucial for the success of mobile applications. A high level of usability implies reduced development costs, reduced maintenance costs and higher customer retention. State-of-the-art usability evaluations produce distorted results for mobile applications, as they are mainly tailored for desktop applications and mostly take place in artificial environments: The test user is isolated from the normal usage context and subject to observation processes which significantly affect the user. This paper presents work in progress and proposes an architecture for a usability evaluation framework which preserves the natural mobile usage context, reduces the interference introduced by observations and reduces the overall costs of the evaluation procedure