Automated User Interface Usability Evaluation Framework For Android Mobile Applications

Abstract

Mobile computing is a type of wireless communication mechanism in order to accomplish our daily activities. Mobile devices companies are increasing their mobile functionalities, screen size, and features from time to time. Android is one type of software stack which used to develop smart phone, tablet, and wrist watch applications. This is an open source platform that provides free documentations, tutorials, and applications. Therefore, mobile companies and application users are increasing from time to time. However, the usability of the applications is in question. Especially, Android user interface component usability is a major issue in mobile application development. To minimize usability problems, Google provides guidelines that can help to develop appropriate and user attractive user interface. However, the developers didn’t apply these guidelines during application development because most user interface design guidelines are available in unorganized form and searching for them is time consuming task. Hence, most developer designed or developed an application based on their experience rather than using the guidelines. To solve the above problems, we designed and implemented a prototype Android application user interface evaluation framework based on the Android guidelines. Currently, there are various types of Usability Evaluation Method (UEM) available with different properties .After reviewed all the methods; we selected Automated Inspection Method (AIM) for this research work. UML design Maker tool used to draw the framework and Android studio for implement the prototype. Specifically, the study considers five user interface evaluation framework and one mobile device evaluation framework. The study includes: such as mobile device evaluation, header and footer evaluation, button typography evaluation, line length evaluation, margin evaluation and action bar menu item evaluation frameworks. Then, the proposed frameworks are integrated with different user interfaces and evaluated on various mobile devices. The proposed prototype evaluation results are compared with their guidelines values. According to the evaluation result, we concluded that the proposed framework can evaluate the evaluated user interface based on the guidelines.