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International Conference on Human-Centred Software Engineering

HCSE 2012: Human-Centered Software Engineering pp 146–163Cite as

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Smartphone Applications Usability Evaluation: A Hybrid Model and Its Implementation

Smartphone Applications Usability Evaluation: A Hybrid Model and Its Implementation

  • Artur H. Kronbauer19,
  • Celso A. S. Santos20 &
  • Vaninha Vieira21 
  • Conference paper
  • 3068 Accesses

  • 15 Citations

  • 1 Altmetric

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNPSE,volume 7623)

Abstract

Evaluating the usability of smartphone applications is crucial for their success, so developers can learn how to adapt them considering the dynamicity of mobile scenarios. The HCI community recommends considering different requirements when evaluating those applications, such as quantitative data (metrics), subjective evaluation (users’ impressions) and context data (e.g. environment and devices conditions). We observed a lack in the literature of approaches that support those three requirements combined into a single experiment; generally one or a pair of them is used. Besides, performing usability evaluation on real mobile scenarios is hard to achieve and most proposals are based on laboratory-controlled experiments. In this paper, we present our proposal for a hybrid usability evaluation of smartphone applications, which is composed by a model and an infrastructure that implements it. The model describes how to automatically monitor and collect context data and usability metrics, how those data can be processed for analysis support and how users’ impressions can be collected. An infrastructure is provided to implement the model allowing it to be plugged into any smartphone Android-based application. To evaluate our proposal, we performed a field experiment, with 21 users using three mobile applications during a 6-month period, in their day-to-day scenarios.

Keywords

  • Usability Evaluation
  • Smartphone Application
  • Remote Usability Evaluation
  • Usability Testing

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. PMCC – UFBA, Av. Adhemar de Barros s/n sala 138, Salvador, BA, Brazil

    Artur H. Kronbauer

  2. DI – CT – UFES, Av. Fernando Ferrari s/n sala 8, Vitória, ES, Brazil

    Celso A. S. Santos

  3. DCC – UFBA, Av. Adhemar de Barros s/n sala 234, Salvador, BA, Brazil

    Vaninha Vieira

Authors
  1. Artur H. Kronbauer
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  2. Celso A. S. Santos
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  3. Vaninha Vieira
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IRIT, Université Paul Sabatier, France

    Marco Winckler

  2. Computer Science Department, University of Rostock, Albert-Einstein-Str. 21, D-18051, Rostock, Germany

    Peter Forbrig

  3. ICS-IRIT, University Paul Sabatier, 118 route de Narbonne, 31062, Toulouse Cedex 9, France

    Regina Bernhaupt

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Cite this paper

Kronbauer, A.H., Santos, C.A.S., Vieira, V. (2012). Smartphone Applications Usability Evaluation: A Hybrid Model and Its Implementation. In: Winckler, M., Forbrig, P., Bernhaupt, R. (eds) Human-Centered Software Engineering. HCSE 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7623. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34347-6_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34347-6_9

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