Mobile Application Software Usability Evaluation: Issues, Methods and Future Research Directions

Recently, the growth and advancement in mobile technology (such as mobile devices, smartphones, mobile wireless networks) have cushioned everyday lives of peoples across the globe. Interestingly, this can be attributed to the greater ease of developing mobile applications for diverse usages such as healthcare, finance, and agriculture. Another reason for this is that, there is the quest to rollout mobile device tailored application software having lower budget, quicker time of delivery, and top-quality product from the developers and the end-user’s perspectives. The challenges of appropriate designs frameworks; and the understanding of the needs of users (that is, the end users) have persisted long after their eventual rollouts. The concept of mobile app usability and accessibility evaluation were developed to enable developers to ascertain the level of usages and relevance of mobile applications in-use or prior release under diverse criteria such as maintainability, understandability, comprehensibility, as well as parameters specified by Usability Standards of ISO 9241-11 (that is, effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction). This study undertakes a systematic literature review (SLR) to discuss the subject of mobile application software usability under the specific scope of issues, methods and future research directions. To achieve these, a total of forty (40) peer-reviewed articles from diverse databases/sources of records were selected. The outcomes of this study revealed that, mobile applications usability evaluations and processes are domain-specific (or locality-dependent). Also, there are no generic approaches identified or developed for performing usability and accessibility of mobile applications due to the non-deterministic nature of the domain, and context-of-use.