A Pilot Study of an Inspection Framework for Automated Usability Guideline Reviews of Mobile Health Applications

Usability is of significant importance for any interactive software. In the mobile domain, applications face more challenges to deliver good experiences to end users due to the characteristics and usage of mobile devices in ubiquitous computing contexts. The situation may be exacerbated for mobile health applications since the target population or domain may impose even stricter usability requirements. Heuristic Evaluation (HE) or guideline review has proven itself to be an effective approach among many usability evaluation methods. Organizing heuristic evaluation by usability professionals, however, can be costly and time consuming, particularly for frequent prototype updates generated by fast iterations. Manual inspection by human experts also suffers from scalability issues as mobile applications often need to run on a diverse set of hardware platforms. To help find potential usability problems at an early stage and reduce the workload of human usability experts, we propose an inspection framework to conduct automated guideline reviews of mobile health applications. The inspection framework is based on the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) usability guidelines for mHealth applications. First, we translate the high level descriptions of usability guidelines into operationalized metrics that can be measured by software. Second, we demonstrate the translation is meaningful by providing detailed analysis of suggested metrics and real-world case studies. We hope this framework can be used to enforce a minimum bar for the usability of mobile health applications and further adapted when new products in the field are developed.