Design and Implementation of a Toolkit for Usability Testing of Mobile Apps
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Design and Implementation of a Toolkit for Usability Testing of Mobile Apps Xiaoxiao Ma · Bo Yan · Guanling Chen · Chunhui Zhang · Ke Huang · Jill Drury · Linzhang Wang
Published online: 21 November 2012 © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Abstract The usability of mobile applications is critical for their adoption because of the relatively small screen and awkward (sometimes virtual) keyboard, despite the recent advances of smartphones. Traditional laboratorybased usability testing is often tedious, expensive, and does not reflect real use cases. In this paper, we propose a toolkit that embeds into mobile applications the ability to automatically collect user interface (UI) events as the user interacts with the applications. The events are fine-grained and useful for quantified usability analysis. We have implemented the toolkit on Android devices and we evaluated the toolkit with a real deployed Android application by comparing event analysis (state-machine based) with traditional laboratory testing (expert based). The results show that our toolkit is effective at capturing detailed UI events for accurate usability analysis. Keywords Toolkit · Usability testing · Mobile application · Automated · Logging method
1 Introduction Led by the rapid growth of the smartphone market, mobile Internet usage in the US is expected to reach 50 % total X. Ma () · B. Yan · G. Chen · C. Zhang · K. Huang · J. Drury Computer Science Department, University of Massachusetts Lowell, 1 University Avenue, Lowell, MA 01854, USA e-mail: [email protected] G. Chen · L. Wang State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Department of Computer Science and Technology, Nanjing University, Nanjing, 210046, People’s Republic of China
usage by 2013 [1]. The usability of the mobile applications, however, remains a thorny issue. A recent study shows that the task completion rate using mobile Web ranges from 38 to 75 % on different phones [2]. The average success rate was only 59 %, substantially lower than the roughly 80 % success rate when testing websites on a regular PC today. Another study shows that 73 % of users experienced the slow-to-load problem when using the mobile Web, and 48 % of users found mobile Web applications difficult to read and use [3]. In this paper, we focus on the usability testing of mobile applications, particularly native (instead of Web based) applications. We envision a system that can automatically collect user interface (UI) events as the user interacts with the mobile application. The collected UI data will then be uploaded to a remote server for either automated or manual usability analysis. This kind of system can complement traditional laboratory testing, and we believe it will be particularly useful to deploy for field-based usability testing. For many mobile application developers, it is often too costly to conduct extensive laboratory-based usability testing and we anticipate that the system described in this paper will be an indispensable toolkit for low-cost usability analysis. We have implem
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