An mHealth Application Redesign based on Nielsen's Usability Heuristics

Abstract

The mobile healthcare (mHealth) industry has demonstrated a significant progress over the years. The growth of mHealth applications in the past decade has been very impressive. Nonetheless, the adoption of mHealth applications in Indonesia has been relatively low. In this research, the usability of a popularly used mHealth application in Indonesia called Halodoc was explored. The usability study was conducted in three phases, which included a usability evaluation of the existing application, a user interface (UI) redesign, and an evaluation of the new prototype. The usability evaluation was performed by a panel of UI/UX practitioners by following the ten principles of Nielsen's usability heuristics. Findings from the usability evaluation showed that many of the usability issues found in the existing application were related to 'visibility of system status', 'helping users to recognize, diagnose and recover from errors', and 'user control and freedom'. To address the identified usability issues, the user interface of the original version of the mobile application was redesigned. The developed prototype was evaluated by the same panel of evaluators. The results showed that the usability of the original version of the application had been improved. In addition, the new prototype helped to improve the findability and accessibility of the application.