A Pilot Study of an Inspection Framework for Automated Usability Guideline Reviews of Mobile Health Applications

Abstract

Usability is of significant importance for any interactive software. In the mobile domain, applications face more challenges to deliver good experiences to end users due to the characteristics and usage of mobile devices in ubiquitous computing contexts. The situation may be exacerbated for mobile health applications since the target population or domain may impose even stricter usability requirements.Heuristic Evaluation (HE) or guideline review has proven itself to be an e↵ective approach among many usability evaluation methods. Organizing heuristic evaluation by usability professionals, however, can be costly and time consuming, particularly for frequent prototype updates generated by fast iterations. Manual inspection by human experts also su↵ers from scalability issues as mobile applications often need to run on a diverse set of hardware platforms.To help find potential usability problems at an early stage and reduce the workload of human usability experts, we propose an inspection framework to conduct automated guideline reviews of mobile health applications. The inspection framework is based on the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) usability guidelines for mHealth applications. First, we translate the high level descriptions of usability guidelines into operationalized metrics that can be measured by software. Second, we demonstrate the translation is meaningful by providing detailed analysis of suggested metrics and real-world case studies. We hope this framework can be used to enforce a minimum bar for the usability of mobile health applications and further adapted when new products in the field are developed.

A Systematic Review of Usability Challenges and Testing in Mobile Health

“…The limitation of the screen size of mobile devices is the most cited usability challenge in our study literature (Arsand et al, 2007), (Kumar et al, 2013), (Preuveneers & Berbers, 2008), (Brown et al, 2013), (Gupta & Gupta, 2011), (Xu et al, 2014), (Sheehan et al, 2012), and (Campbell et al, 2011). Manufacturers of smartphones seem to be conscious of this, which is evident from the way some of them have increased the size from one generation of the model to the next.…”

“…In addition to that ,the user interface was the greatest percentage due to the formality, that is very complicated made which tend to be confusing to user as a result as negative response (Arsand, Varmedal, & Hartvigsen, 2007), (Kumar, Nilsen, Pavel, & Srivastava, 2013), (Ahmad, Komninos, & Baillie, 2008), (Bardram et al, 2013), (Brown, Yen, Rojas, & Schnall, 2013), (Gupta & Gupta, 2011), (Xu et al, 2014), (Sheehan et al, 2012), (Yeh & Fontenelle, 2012), and (Campbell, Tossell, Byrne, & Kortum, 2011) .Therefore, when the interface designed unfriendly user may cause an expected response (Kumar et al, 2013). The usability attributes of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction are generally measured by task completion rates, time for task completion.…”

“…Moreover, Campbell, Tossell, Byrne and Kortum (2011) have found significant impact of various surrounding factors on mobile health usage; they include visual motion, sound variance, luminosity (level of lighting), sound semantics (that is, meaningful sounds around the user) and proximity to other people. Furthermore, mobile users' time constraints could impact on task efficiency (Arsand et al, 2007), (Kumar et al, 2013), and (Xu et al, 2014).…”

“…Moreover, typing on a mobile keyboard is a difficult task because performing tasks such as shifting between lowercase, uppercase, numerals, and symbols requires a shift to a different keyboard (Xu et al, 2014). This aspect can make users frustrated while interacting with the touch screen and trying to click on small objects, such as buttons, icons, and images (Arsand et al, 2007), and (Sheehan et al, 2012).…”

“…Work pattern sequences to complete the tasks. To design the interface consistent, when understand of how one screen work this help the users to understand how to monitor other acts of whether the tasks track the progress of a similar work (Xu, Ding, Huang, & Chen, 2014). Therefore, it is safe to say that usability defines the relation between product and its user (Amelung, Ohl, Schade, & Wagner, 2010).…”