An Empirical Study on the Impact of Gender on Mobile Applications Usability

Abstract

In the area of broadband wireless Internet, mobile applications have already replaced their desktop equivalents and are recognized as valuable tools for any size of businesses and for private use. With the emergence of millions of apps, the quality of their interaction with the user remains an open question for software vendors. While female and male requirements and preferences are not always similar, to the best of our knowledge, few studies have examined the impact of gender on the perceived usability of mobile applications. Therefore, the goal of this study is to assess their usability from the perspective of female and male users, and to evaluate the differences between them. In our study, based on an experimental setup with a group of 40 users (16 females and 24 males), with regard to three usability attributes, namely efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction, both qualitative and quantitative data were collected, respectively via pre- and post-testing questionnaires and during application testing sessions, combined with the think aloud protocol. To analyze the collected data, descriptive statistics were extracted from the video data and used to calculate the inferential statistics. With a significance level (alpha) of 5%, our findings show that between the groups of females and males, there were no statistically significant differences in the performance accuracy, average completion time, and perceived satisfaction, since all <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">p</i> values are greater than the assumed alpha. Hence, one can conclude that no effect of gender was observed with regard to the usability of the Gmail application. Overall, the empirical results contribute to the ongoing research on mobile application usability by providing evidence-based insights that we believe may be valuable for both theory and practice.