Usability of mobile applications: literature review and rationale for a new usability model

By Rachel Harrison, Derek Flood, David A. Duce. Journal of Interaction Science, 2013

733 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The usefulness of mobile devices has increased greatly in recent years allowing users to perform more tasks in a mobile context. This increase in usefulness has come at the expense of the usability of these devices in some contexts. We conducted a small review of mobile usability models and found that usability is usually measured in terms of three attributes; effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Other attributes, such as cognitive load, tend to be overlooked in the usability models that are most prominent despite their likely impact on the success or failure of an application. To remedy this we introduces the PACMAD (People At the Centre of Mobile Application Development) usability model which was designed to address the limitations of existing usability models when applied to mobile devices. PACMAD brings together significant attributes from different usability models in order to create a more comprehensive model. None of the attributes that it includes are new, but the existing prominent usability models ignore one or more of them. This could lead to an incomplete usability evaluation. We performed a literature search to compile a collection of studies that evaluate mobile applications and then evaluated the studies using our model.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a5118ccdb4e6dc8cf13a1423bb276eb8ed8976b

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Citations in the corpus

The mHealth App Usability Questionnaire (MAUQ): Development and Validation Study (2019, background): “The categories included items such as usefulness, ease of learning, ease of use, effectiveness, satisfaction, interface quality, interaction quality, reliability, error messages and online support, internet connectivity, and social settings of mobile app use [9,24-26].”
UI Dark Patterns and Where to Find Them: A Study on Mobile Applications and User Perception (2020, background): “With the advent of mobile devices, additional guidelines and rules have been proposed [49, 67, 78, 99].”
Location based services: ongoing evolution and research agenda (2018, background): “While usability is still one of the main concerns for the evaluation of mobile applications (Harrison, Flood, and Duce 2013), a comprehensive framework for LBS evaluation must also account explicitly for the following characteristics: user interface, user properties and skills, cognition, device…”
An expectation-confirmation model of continuance intention to use mobile instant messaging (2016, methodology): “A technology with good user interface enhances the total user experience (Flavián et al., 2006; Harrison et al., 2013; Karapanos, 2013; Zviran et al., 2006), and increases user satisfaction (Legris et al., 2003; Liu et al., 2009; Zviran et al., 2006).”