Using a Controlled Experiment to Evaluate Usability Inspection Technologies for Improving the Quality of Mobile Web Applications Earlier in their Design

Abstract

Usability is one of the key attributes for software quality that verifies the ability of the software to be understood, operated and attractive to users. In the specific case of mobile Web applications, usability can make the difference between their actual use and lack of acceptance. To assist software quality improvement at a lower cost, in previous work we proposed a set of usability inspection technologies for mockups, called Design Usability Evaluation (DUE), which can be applied earlier in the development of mobile Web applications. This paper shows an empirical study evaluating if the DUE technologies are able to aid development teams in the quality improvement of mobile Web applications. A development team applied the suggestions from the DUE technologies to make improvements over a set of previously evaluated mockups from a real mobile Web application. Then, users from different profiles tested both the initial and improved versions of the evaluated mockups to see if the later had been enhanced in terms of usability and quality. The results show that: (a) users preferred the redesigned version of the application's mockups; (b) users were able to successfully perform more tasks in the redesigned version of the application; and (c) users perceived that software quality improved after correcting the identified usability problems by applying the DUE technologies.