An SLR overview on User Centered Design (UCD) of Mobile Applications

Zaheer Ahmad Department of Computer Science University of Peshawar Ahmad.zaheer@yahoo.com

Abstract Design of applications is always a tricky and complicated issue. In case of mobile phones it become a multifaceted concern, because of comparatively increased number of constrains and limitations. User Centric Design (UCD) approach for designing applications have been adopted from the computer world and is aggressively followed to design mobile apps. Inhere a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) methodology would be followed to study and evaluate different UCD approaches, tools and techniques used in different mobile application development. In order to draw a conclusion and find out which technique is suited in general and in specific scenarios. 1. Introduction Users are bombarded with volume of experiences and interactions through new mobile applications (Apps), websites and software. To overcome usage problems of different designs and interfaces of applications a user friendly approach is always the main priority of designers .Users Centered Design (UCD) is a design philosophy in which users needs, wants and constraints are taken into consideration at each stage of the design process. Considering and taking care of different processes of UCD and how to fulfil a mobile user experience is a task that takes quite a bit of research and time digging into different models and approaches. There are many processes, models and tools that can be used for UCD. The problem arises in the selection and rationalization of these processes, which one is right and which is wrong, which one works and which one doesnt. This paper will follow a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) process to study different approaches and their workability in terms of mobile phone designing and interfaces. In the subsections of intro a general overview of different tools and process is given. Section-2 discusses limitations of mobile phone and the issues it born for designing applications. In section-3 the literature review based on the SLR is given. In the end Section-4, discusses and concludes the paper. 1.1. Tools and Process of UCD

As discussed in [7] below is a list of common tools and techniques of UCD. 1

Understanding the work context Methods: focus groups, interviews, observation Representations: the rich picture Problems in the home domain: people are not practiced at articulating what they do at home or why they do it. Understanding the work Methods: focus groups, interviews, observation Representations: HTA, WOD and exceptions, scenarios Problems in the home domain: as above, and what is the equivalent of a task? Testing a top level design against your understanding of the work Methods: Scenario walkthrough, Cognitive Walk Through Representations: Story boards, dialogue modelling Problems in the home domain: what is the equivalent of a task? User testing of more detailed prototypes Methods: Usability Labs., Cooperative Evaluation Representations: Paper prototypes, simulations Problems in the home domain: what is the task to be set

2. Limitations of mobile phones and Resultant Design Issues

When designing for mobiles, there are certain concerns that need to be taken into consideration such as smaller screen sizes, keyboard size and layout, simplified navigation, prioritization of content, limited mobile browsers and problems with rendering pages, bandwidth and design for connectivity issues [1]. These and many other issues, makes the designing a complicated issues for mobile phones. 3. Research Strategies-SLR The research strategy followed in this paper is based on System Literature Review (SLR). 3.1. Planning and Protocol of the Study

In the subsequent sections a protocol developed for this study is discussed:

3.2.

Need for UCD under systematic review

In the post PC era, main focus of development is on mobile phone. The phenomenal mobile phone penetration is demanding user centric design. Mobile phone application are mostly user friendly but the penetration level of mobile phone make a significant level of population to go through a learning curve. In this paper, using SLR a comparison would be drawn to highlight these issues, draw some guidelines for mobile phone app designing and make the future development easier.

3.3.

The Research Question

The focus of this study would be to answer, the impact of level of UCD used in mobile phone apps, the secondary answers might be found are the tools and strategies used and its effect on mobile application development on the process and on the end users.

3.4.

Study selection criteria

Keeping in view the interest in mobile phone applications the author firstly concentration to find out processes differences in the software engineering in general and the mobile application software engineering. However, as mobile application at present are small in nature and the life cycle of software engineering is not strictly followed as for PC applications. During the process of search and drilldown it was found that mobile phone needs more focus on UCD as compare to PC because of different limitation of mobile phones and the level of and diverse usage of mobile phone at present and in the future. Not only is cell phone usage increasing rapidly, but its intended usage has now gone beyond simple phone calls to include multimedia, document related activities, and multimodal communication via text and video [2]. Based on the initial findings, UCD in mobile applications was selected. The search terms used are given below in random software engineering mobile phone application, mobile phone software engineering, mobile phone development life cycle, mobile phone designing, usability of mobile phone applications app mobile phone application usability testing mobile phone design usability testing mobile phone usability testing mobile phone interface designing, mobile phone limitation, mobile phone usage, android development software engineering, iPhone development software engineering and Nokia development and software engineering Mobile Website and Application usability Mobile application designing UCD. 3

References of papers were followed to get papers based on their names and authors. It was tried to select papers from renowned journals and conferences however, due to the limited number of publications in the area later on the restrication was relaxed a bit. The included list was limited to mobile phone applications, tools, and websites developed for mobile phone interaction only. UCD related to computers were excluded. The list below shows selected digital libraries, journals and conferences searched for the topics between 2005-2012. IEEExplore ACM Digital library: Google scholar (scholar.google.com) Citeseer library (citeseer.ist.psu.edu) Inspec (www.iee.org/Publish/INSPEC/) ScienceDirect (www.sciencedirect.com) EI Compendex Empirical Software Engineering and Springer Conference Proceedings, or SCOPUS Empirical Software Engineering (J) Information and Software Technology (J) Software Process Improvement and Practice (J) Management Science (J) International Software Metrics Symposium (C) International Conference on Software Engineering (C) Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (manual search) (C)

The above list is besides the general search using Google to increase the list of papers for review as long as possible.

3.5.

Study selection procedures. This paper is reviewed by the course supervisor, she is Phd in Software engineering, on her review and recommendation it would be submitted to a research journal/conference for peer review. Data Extraction

3.6.

Data extracted from 24 research papers is given at appendix-A.

4. Conclusion During the review of above 24 listed paper, it was found that quality research in each of the phases of UCD helps gain a greater understanding of some aspects of the problem and issues. In addition, if the research is of a high quality then the practitioner earns the respect of the client and the relationship is improved. Because of the complexity of the mobile device and the contexts in which the devices are used, different research methods are better in certain situations. While in the wild research has many benefits, lab-based research can also offer useful insights and improve the overall client relationship by allowing them to participate more actively. Many developers have never used guidelines for good designing, which raises the issue of their effectiveness. Finally, extensive usage of UCD tools made the application usable from their very first appearance in the market. However, there is still a need to focus on core usability and accessibility when designing mobile applications and products. References 1. Miroslav Minovic School of Business Administration, ,Velimir Stavljanin , " User Centerd Design of mLearning System: Moodle on the go, Journal of Computer Science and Engineering Vol 4 No.1 March 2010 Pages 80-95 Ashish Godbole, Seung-yun Kim , "User Centered Design of Context Aware Cell Phones in Human-centric Systems , IEEE IRI 2010, August 4-6, 2010, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA 978-1-4244-8099-9/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE" "Amina Tariq, Ajay Tanwani, Muddassar Farooq, "User Centered Design of E-Health Applications for Remote Patient Management, CHINZ 09 Auckland, New Zealand" Zahid Hussain, Martin Lechner, Harald Milchrahm, Sara Shahzad, Wolfgang Slany, Martin Umgeher, Thomas Vlk , "User Interface Design for a Mobile Multimedia Application: An Iterative Approach, First International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interaction 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/ACHI.2008.24 Josh Fridgen, User-Centered Design in a Time Crunch A Case Study in Developing a Mobile Grocery Shopping Application Anne Kaikkonen , "Usability Testing of Mobile Applications: A Comparison between Laboratory and Field Testing", Journal of Usability Studies Issue 1, Vol. 1, November 2005, pp. 4-16" 5

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Andrew Monk, "USER-CENTRED DESIGN THE HOME USE CHALLENGE , Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 181-190." Applying User-Centered Design to Mobile Application Development", COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM July 2005/Vol. 48, No. 7 55 " Nivala, A.-M., Sarjakoski, L.T, T. Sarjakoski , "User-Centred Design and Development of a Mobile Map Service", Proceedings, ScanGIS2005 E. Kangas, T. Kinnunen, Applying User-centered Design to Mobile Application Development" , Communications of the ACM, vol. 48, pp. 55-59, July 2005 Zahid Hussain , Martin Lechner , "Integrating Extreme Programming and User-Centered Design Subramanya , User interfaces for mobile content ", S.R. LGE Mobile Research Yi, B.K. Volume: 39 , Issue: 4 Page(s): 85 - 87 Product Type: Journals & Magazines" J. Gimeno, P. Morillo, I. Coma and M. Fern, "A Device- Independent 3D User Interface for Mobile Phones Based on Motion and Tracking Techniques" Anthony I. Wasserman , "Software Engineering Issues for Mobile Application Development" Josh Dehlinger , Jeremy Dixon ,"Mobile Application Software Engineering: Challenges and Research Directions

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16 "Axel Spriestersbach 1 , Thomas Springer 2 1 SAP-AG, Corporate Research, Germany axel.spriestersbach@sap.com 2Dresden University of Technology, Germany springet@rn.inf.tu-dresden.de" "Quality Attributes in mobile Web Application Development" 17. 18. "Software Development Aspects of a Mobile Food Ordering System " Shwetak N. Patel and Gregory D. Abowd, " "Beyond Mobile Telephony Exploring Opportunities for Applications on the Mobile Phone Handset" Deepti Sahu, Shipra Sharma, Vandana Dubey, Alpika ,"Cloud Computing in Mobile Applications, International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 2, Issue 8, August 2012

19.

20.

Paul POCATILU , " Developing Mobile Learning Applications for Android using Web Service, Informatica Economic? vol. 14, no. 3/2010 Andreas Birkhofer, Sina Deibert und Franz Rothlauf ,"Critical success factors for mobile field service applications: A case research" Domenico Amalfitano, Anna Rita Fasolino, Porfirio Tramontana " A GUI Crawlingbased technique for Android Mobile Application Testing Wayne Piekarski , Ross Smith ,"Robust Gloves For 3D Interaction In Mobile Outdoor AR Environments " Wayne Piekarski , "Simple Collaborative Indoor-Outdoor Modelling Using Mobile Augmented Reality "

21.

22.

23.

24.

Appendix-A S# Paper Title Publication Area Focus ed Area Level of UCD Consid ered (Low,M edium,F ully) Fully UCD tool( s) Used Effe ct of UCD Tool Use d User Satif icati on Authors

User Centerd Design of mLearning System: Moodle on the go

Journal of Computer Science and Engineering Vol 4 No.1 March 2010 Pages 80-95

Mobiel Phone in learnin g syste ms

Mobile Learni ng (Phon es)

questi onnai r

User Centered Design of Context Aware Cell Phones in Humancentric Systems

IEEE IRI 2010, August 4-6, 2010, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA 978-1-424480999/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE

Conte xt aware cell phone s

Conte xt aware syste ms

Fully

User Centered Design of EHealth Applications for Remote Patient Management

CHINZ 09 Auckland, New Zealand

eHealt h Syste m

UCD frame work for mobile ehealth applic ations

Fully

Surve ys, Field Studi es, Interv iews, Exper ience sampl ing, Enduser Valid ation backg impr round oved analy app sis, desig n conce ptuali zation , iterati ve protot ype imple ment ation,

Miroslav Minovic School of Business Administration, University of Belgrade, Serbia mminovic@fon.rs Velimir Stavljanin School of Business Administration, University of Belgrade, Serbia velimirs@fon.rs Ashish Godbole and Seung-yun Kim2 Independent Researcher, godbole@gmail.com Department of Computer Sciences, Mathematics, and Engineering Shepherd University, skim@shepherd.edu

more Amina Tariq, Ajay satis Tanwani, Muddassar ed Farooq Next Generation Intelligent Networks Research Center (nexGIN RC) FAST- NU,Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan {amina.tariq,ajay.tanwani, muddassar.farooq}@nexgi nrc.org

User Interface Design for a Mobile Multimedia Application: An Iterative Approach

First International Conference on Advances in ComputerHuman Interaction 2008 IEEE DOI 10.1109/AC HI.2008.24

conten tbased search for audio and video conten

UCD based mobile audiov ideo app

Fully

UserCentered Design in a Time Crunch A Case Study in Developing a Mobile Grocery Shopping Application Usability Testing of Mobile Applications: A Comparison between Laboratory

http://www.cs e.sc.edu/~ea stman/NSFREU/REU20 05/PapersAn dPresentatio ns/FridgenPa per.pdf

moble grocer y shoppi ng applic ation

UCD testing for grocer y

Fully

and usabil ity evaluatio n,Foc us Grou ps,Fi eld Obse rvatio n Study , Userinterf ace protot ypes, paper mock -ups, users feedb ack, beha viorbase d mode l First Interv iews, Paper Protot ype, Worki ng Protot ype Not menti oend

adju st the syst em effec tively

Zahid Hussain, Martin Lechner, Harald Milchrahm, Sara Shahzad, Wolfgang Slany, Martin Umgeher, Thomas Vlk Graz University of Technology, Institute for Software Technology m3@ist.tugraz.at, www.ist.tugraz.at Peter Wolkerstorfer CURE - Center for Usability Research & Engineering wolkerstorfer@cure.at, www.cure.at Josh Fridgen Department of Computer Science/Information Systems College of Saint Scholastica Duluth, MN 55811 jfridgen@css.edu

it help ed to addr ess man y of the issu es

Journal of Usability Studies Issue 1, Vol. 1, November 2005, pp. 416

Mobile usabili ty testing

Low

Anne Kaikkonen Nokia P.O.Box 407, 00045 Nokia Group, Finland +358504837400 anne.kaikkonen@nokia.co m 9

and Field Testing

USERCENTRED DESIGN THE HOME USE CHALLENG E

Applying UserCentered Design to Mobile Application Development

Sloane, A. and van Rijn, F. Home informatics and telematics: information technology and society. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 181-190. COMMUNIC ATIONS OF THE ACM July 2005/Vol. 48, No. 7 55

good design of inform ation and comm unicati on techno logy

UCD for artifica ts

fully

protot ype of the user interf ace , scena rios check ing

Andrew Monk, University of York, UK University of York, U.K., a.monk@psych.york.ac.uk

UserCenter ed Desig n (UCD) proces s we used for the Genim ap Navig ator and Image Plus produc t

medium

protot ype, meeti ngs

tests and resul ts were usef ul and suite d to this appli catio n beca use the enduser task s were not relat ed to a spec ific mobi 10

le cont ext

UserCentred Design and Development of a Mobile Map Service

Proceedings, ScanGIS200 5

spatial data servic e for mobile users

Descri be guideli ne for UCD for mobile map applic ations

fully

10

Applying Usercentered Design to Mobile Application Development

Communicati ons of the ACM, vol. 48, pp. 5559, July 2005

mobile messa ge

fully

User Grou ps, field test, meeti ngs, Exper t Evalu ation, Find Out the Conte xt of the Use conte xtual paper protot ype, realist ic UI (user interf ace)

Nivala, A.-M., Sarjakoski, L.T. and T. Sarjakoski Department of Geoinformatics and Cartography, Finnish Geodetic Institute, P.O. Box 15, FIN-02431 Masala, Finland Annu-Maaria.Nivala@fgi.fi - Tiina.Sarjakoski@fgi.fi Tapani.Sarjakoski@fgi.fi

E. Kangas, T. Kinnunen

11

11

Integrating Extreme Programmin g and UserCentered Design

multim edia stream ing applic ation

fully

protot ype, and usabil ity testin g) iterati ve steps, protot ypes, user storie s,pap er mock ups,f eedb ack given by the usabil ity engin eers, enduser tests

This pract ice led to an appli catio n that from the begi nnin g was lacki ng man y of the teeth ing troub les com mon to tech nicia ndomi nate d deve lopm ent team s and can be seen as a big

Zahid Hussain1, Martin Lechner1, Harald Milchrahm1, Sara Shahzad1, Wolfgang Slany1, Martin Umgeher1, and Peter Wolkerstorfer2 1 Institute for Software Technology, Technical University Graz, Austria, m3@ist.tugraz.at 2 CURE - Center for Usability Research & Engineering wolkerstorfer@cure.at

12

succ ess facto r for our proje ct

12

User interfaces for mobile content

Date of Publication: April 2006 Author(s): Subramanya, S.R. LGE Mobile Research Yi, B.K. Volume: 39 , Issue: 4 Page(s): 85 87 Product Type: Journals & Magazines

Mobile UI

fully

13

13

A DeviceIndependent 3D User Interface for Mobile Phones Based on Motion and Tracking Techniques

3D User Interfa ce

fully

14

Software Engineering Issues for Mobile Application Development

softwa re engine ering resear ch issues related to the develo pment of applic ations that run on mobile device s

Low

protot ype applic ation, perfor manc e evalu ation, User Evalu ation Not Menti oned

J. Gimeno, P. Morillo, I. Coma and M. Fern andez Instituto de Rob otica Universidad de Valencia (Spain) E-mail: Jesus.Gimeno@uv.es

Anthony I. Wasserman Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Bldg. 23, M/S 23-14 Moffett Field, CA 94035 USA +1 650 335 2807 tonyw@sv.cmu.edu

14

15

Mobile Application Software Engineering: Challenges and Research Directions

challe nges to mobile applic ation softwa re engine ering and provid es a discus sion of possib le resear ch directi ons, drawin g from existin g areas of softwa re engine ering, that should be further exami ned. Specifi cally, we exami ne the challe nge of: 1) creatin g user interfa ces acces sible

Low

Not Menti oned

Josh Dehlinger and Jeremy Dixon Department of Computer and Information Sciences Towson University jdehlinger@towson.edu, jdixon6@students.towson. edu

15

16

Quality Attributes in mobile Web Application Development

to differe ntlyabled users; 2) handli ng the compl exity of providi ng applic ations across multipl e mobile platfor ms; 3) design ing contex taware aware applic ations; and, 4) specif ying requir ement s uncert ainty. The paper descri bes typical challe nges in the develo pment of mobile web

Axel Spriestersbach 1 , Thomas Springer 2 1 SAP-AG, Corporate Research, Germany axel.spriestersbach@sap.c om 2 Dresden University of Technology, Germany springet@rn.inf.tu16

applic ation

dresden.de

17

Software Development Aspects of a Mobile Food Ordering System

18

Beyond Mobile Telephony Exploring Opportunitie s for Applications on the Mobile Phone Handset

food orderi ng applic ation on mobile device s the paper discus ses the J2ME develo pment enviro nment for curren t mobile phone s and demon strate applic ations develo ped that respec t the resour ce constr aints while

medium

PRO TOTY PE

Low

Not Menti oned

Shwetak N. Patel and Gregory D. Abowd College of Computing & GVU Center, 801 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA 303320280, USA {shwetak, abowd}@cc.gatech.edu

17

simult aneou sly exploit ing the unique featur es of these comm erciall y availa ble device s

19

Cloud Computing in Mobile Applications

20

Developing Mobile Learning Applications for Android using Web Services

International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 2, Issue 8, August 2012 1 ISSN 22503153 Informatica Economic vol. 14, no. 3/2010

mobile cloud compu ting

Low

Not Menti oned

Deepti Sahu, Shipra Sharma, Vandana Dubey, Alpika Tripathi Department of Computer Science, Amity University, Lucknow, India

develo pment of a distrib uted mobile learnin g applic ation for Androi d. The client applic ation comm unicat

Medium

protot ype

Paul POCATILU Economic Informatics Department Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania ppaul@ase.ro

18

es with the server using Web servic es

21

Critical success factors for mobile field service applications: A case research

paper presen ts a multipl e case resear ch concer ning succe ss factors and issues of mobile field servic e imple mentat ions.

Medium

intervi ews

Andreas Birkhofer, Sina Deibert und Franz Rothlauf

22

A GUI Crawlingbased technique for Android Mobile Application Testing

Low

Not Menti oned

Domenico Amalfitano, Anna Rita Fasolino, Porfirio Tramontana domenico.amalfitano@uni na.it, anna.fasolino@unina.it, porfirio.tramontana@unina .it Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Universit di Napoli Federico II, Via Claudio 21, 80125 Napoli, Italy

19

23

Robust Gloves For 3D Interaction In Mobile Outdoor AR Environment s

24

Simple Collaborative IndoorOutdoor Modelling Using Mobile Augmented Reality

design of handworn gloves for interacting with mobile outdoo r augme nted reality syste ms 3D modell ing with augme nted reality (AR)

Low

Not Menti oned

Wayne Piekarski and Ross Smith Wearable Computer Laboratory School of Computer and Information Science University of South Australia Mawson Lakes, SA, 5095, Australia wayne@cs.unisa.edu.au, ross@cs.unisa.edu.au

Low

Not Menti oned

Wayne Piekarski Wearable Computer Lab University of South Australia Mawson Lakes Bvd, Mawson Lakes Adelaide, SA, 5095, Australia Tel. +61 8 8302 5070 Fax +61 8 8302 3381 wayne@cs.unisa.edu.au, http://www.tinmith.net/way ne

20

21