An Empirical Study to Evaluate the Feasibility of a UX and Usability Inspection Technique for Mobile Applications

Abstract

Usability and UX (User eXperience) are some of the most important factors for evaluating the quality of mobile applications. They focus on how easy to use an application is and the emotions that such use evokes. However, these aspects are often evaluated separately in industry through different evaluation techniques. Although it is possible to identify more usability and UX problems by employing different UX and usability evaluation methods, this distributed approach may not be cost effective and may not allow to thoroughly explore the identified issues. In order to support the identification of both UX and usability problems in a single evaluation, we have proposed Userbility, an UX and usability inspection technique that allows evaluating these aspects in mobile applications. This paper presents an empirical study over the second version of Userbility to verify its feasibility. In this study, we compared Userbility with the UX and Usability Guidelines Approach (UUGA) that helps the evaluation of usability and UX separately in mobile applications. According to the quantitative results, considering efficiency, UUGA was better than the Userbility technique. However, the qualitative results suggest that Userbility pointed more improvement suggestions, which could be useful for redesigning the evaluated application. the emotions, perceptions and judgements of an application. Therefore, software development teams willing to increase the quality in use of the developed mobile applications need to evaluate both of them. To evaluate usability and UX together, in our previous work (13), we developed Userbility in order to support inspectors in the evaluation of both UX and usability in mobile applications at the same time, to assess whether Userbility can support inspectors in detecting usability and UX problems. Nascimento et al. (13) conducted a study with five mobile applications. The results showed that it is possible to identify improvements in applications, and allowed us to identify problems during the use of the technique. Based on this, in this paper, we proposed a new version of the technique and an empirical study to evaluate the feasibility of Userbility. We have compared the Userbility to an approach proposed by De Paula et al. (5), which evaluates UX and usability separately. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II presents a background on UX and usability evaluation techniques that can be applied to evaluate mobile applications. Then, Section III shows the Userbility technique in its second version. Section IV presents the empirical study where we compared Userbility with another evaluation approach. In Section V, we present the results of the empirical study. Finally, Section VI presents our conclusions and future work.