Usability Based Rating Scale for Mobile Health Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a usability study that aims to develop a reliable, multipurpose, comprehensive scale for classification and rating the quality of m_health applications. The rating scale will be primarily based on the ISO standards of Usability (ISO: 9241–11) based on Effectiveness, Efficiency and Satisfaction and another ISO Standard (9126–1) composed of Functionality, Reliability, Usability, Efficiency, Maintainability and Portability. At the present time, there is no quality assessment tool for mobile application rating based on usability beyond Star_Ratings. This scale will initially be used for analysis of different m_health applications and will be helpful for researchers. Our methodology is based on four steps. In first step, we selected 9 most famous m_Health applications which have maximum number of downloads which were evaluated by involving 45 end users. In 2nd step the existing work on rating scale is explored which is found very limited. In 3rd step, we defined taxonomy of usability parameters, distributed them in major and minor classes and the questionnaire for rating m_health applications was also designed. In 4th step, for evaluation of new Rating scale, another group of 45 users were selected. After evaluation of 9 m_health applications, it is finally found that newly developed rating scale is compatible with user effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. The 5 star rating scale cannot point out which features of applications require enhancement or need improvements. The newly developed scale rightly highlights the weakness of an application in five different categories. The details questionnaire not only shows satisfaction level on individual parameters but also highlight the aspects which need attention.