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

Zaheer AhmadDepartment 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 doesn’t. 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.

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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

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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.

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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.

3.6. Data Extraction

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

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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

2. 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"

3. "Amina Tariq, Ajay Tanwani, Muddassar Farooq, "User Centered Design of E-Health

Applications for Remote Patient Management”, CHINZ ’09 Auckland, New Zealand"

4. 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

5. Josh Fridgen, “User-Centered Design in a Time Crunch A Case Study in Developing a

Mobile Grocery Shopping Application “

6. 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

7. Andrew Monk, "USER-CENTRED DESIGN THE HOME USE CHALLENGE , Kluwer

Academic Publishers, pp. 181-190."

8. Applying User-Centered Design to Mobile Application Development",

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM July 2005/Vol. 48, No. 7 55 "

9. Nivala, A.-M., Sarjakoski, L.T, T. Sarjakoski , "User-Centred Design and Development of

a Mobile Map Service", Proceedings, ScanGIS’2005

10. E. Kangas, T. Kinnunen”, Applying User-centered Design to Mobile Application

Development" , Communications of the ACM, vol. 48, pp. 55-59, July 2005

11. Zahid Hussain , Martin Lechner , "Integrating Extreme Programming and User-Centered

Design”

12. 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"

13. J. Gimeno, P. Morillo, I. Coma and M. Fern, "A Device- Independent 3D User Interface

for Mobile Phones Based on Motion and Tracking Techniques"

14. Anthony I. Wasserman , "Software Engineering Issues for Mobile Application

Development"

15. Josh Dehlinger , Jeremy Dixon ,"Mobile Application Software Engineering: Challenges

and Research Directions”

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. "Software Development Aspects of a Mobile Food Ordering System "

18. Shwetak N. Patel and Gregory D. Abowd, " "Beyond Mobile Telephony Exploring

Opportunities for Applications on the Mobile Phone Handset"

19. 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

6

20. Paul POCATILU , " Developing Mobile Learning Applications for Android using Web

Service”, Informatica Economic? vol. 14, no. 3/2010

21. Andreas Birkhofer, Sina Deibert und Franz Rothlauf ,"Critical success factors for mobile

field service applications: A case research"

22. Domenico Amalfitano, Anna Rita Fasolino, Porfirio Tramontana " A GUI Crawling-

based technique for Android Mobile Application Testing”

23. Wayne Piekarski , Ross Smith ,"Robust Gloves For 3D Interaction In Mobile Outdoor AR

Environments "

24. Wayne Piekarski , "Simple Collaborative Indoor-Outdoor Modelling Using Mobile

Augmented Reality "

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Appendix-A

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 S# Paper Title Publication Area Focused Area

Level of UCD Considered (Low,Medium,Fully)

UCD tool(s) Used

Effect of UCD Tool Used

User Satification

Authors

1 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 learning systems

Mobile Learning (Phones)

Fully questionnair

    Miroslav MinovicSchool of Business Administration, University of Belgrade, Serbia mminovic@fon.rsVelimir Stavljanin School of Business Administration, University of Belgrade, Serbiavelimirs@fon.rs

2 User Centered Design of Context Aware Cell Phonesin Human-centric Systems

IEEE IRI 2010, August 4-6, 2010, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA978-1-4244-8099-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE

Context aware cell phones

Context aware systems

Fully Surveys, Field Studies, Interviews, Experience sampling, End-user Validation

    Ashish Godbole and Seung-yun Kim2Independent Researcher, godbole@gmail.comDepartment of Computer Sciences, Mathematics, and Engineering Shepherd University, skim@shepherd.edu

3 User Centered Design of E-Health Applications for RemotePatient Management

CHINZ ’09 Auckland, New Zealand

eHealth System

UCD framework for mobile e-health applications

Fully background analysis, design conceptualization, iterative prototype implementation, and usabil

improved app

more satisfied

Amina Tariq, Ajay Tanwani, Muddassar FarooqNext Generation Intelligent Networks Research Center (nexGIN RC)FAST- NU,Islamabad, 44000, Pakistan{amina.tariq,ajay.tanwani,muddassar.farooq}@nexginrc.org

9

ity eval-uation,Focus Groups,Field Observation Study,

4 User Interface Design for a Mobile Multimedia Application: An IterativeApproach

First International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interaction 2008 IEEEDOI 10.1109/ACHI.2008.24

content-based search for audio and videoconten

UCD based mobile audiovideo app

Fully User-interface prototypes,paper mock-ups, users feedback, behavior-based model

adjust the system effectively

  Zahid Hussain, Martin Lechner, Harald Milchrahm, Sara Shahzad,Wolfgang Slany, Martin Umgeher, Thomas VlkGraz University of Technology, Institute for Software Technologym3@ist.tugraz.at, www.ist.tugraz.atPeter WolkerstorferCURE - Center for Usability Research & Engineeringwolkerstorfer@cure.at, www.cure.at

5 User-Centered Design in a Time Crunch A Case Study in Developing a Mobile Grocery Shopping Application

http://www.cse.sc.edu/~eastman/NSF-REU/REU2005/PapersAndPresentations/FridgenPaper.pdf

moble grocery shopping application

UCD testing for grocery

Fully First Interviews,Paper Prototype, Working Prototype

it helped to address many of the issues

  Josh Fridgen Department of Computer Science/Information Systems College of Saint Scholastica Duluth, MN 55811 jfridgen@css.edu

6 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

Mobile usability testing

  Low Not mentioend

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

10

7 USER-CENTRED DESIGN THE HOME USE CHALLENGE

Sloane, A. and van Rijn, F. Home informatics andtelematics: information technology and society. Boston: KluwerAcademic Publishers, pp. 181-190.

gooddesign of information and communication technology

UCD for artificats

fully prototype of the user interface , scenarios checking

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

8 Applying User-CenteredDesignto Mobile Application Development

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM July 2005/Vol. 48, No. 7 55

User-CenteredDesign (UCD) process we used for the GenimapNavigator and ImagePlus product

  medium prototype, meetings

  tests and results were useful andsuited to this application because the end-user taskswere not related to a specific mobile context

 

9 User-Centred Design and Development of a Mobile

Proceedings, ScanGIS’2005

spatial data service for mobile

Describe guideline for UCD

fully User Groups, field test,

    Nivala, A.-M., Sarjakoski, L.T. and T. SarjakoskiDepartment of Geoinformatics and Cartography, Finnish

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Map Service users for mobile map applications

meetings, Expert Evaluation, Find Out the Context of the Use

Geodetic Institute,P.O. Box 15, FIN-02431 Masala, FinlandAnnu-Maaria.Nivala@fgi.fi - Tiina.Sarjakoski@fgi.fi - Tapani.Sarjakoski@fgi.fi

10 Applying User-centered Design to Mobile Application Development

Communications of the ACM, vol. 48, pp. 55-59, July 2005

mobile

message

  fully contextual paper prototype, realistic UI (user interface) prototype, and usability testing)

    E. Kangas, T. Kinnunen

11 Integrating Extreme Programming and User-Centered Design

  multimedia streaming application

  fully iterative steps, prototypes, user stories,paper mock-ups,feedback given by the usability engineers,

This practice led to an application that from the beginningwas lacking many of the teeth

  Zahid Hussain1, Martin Lechner1, Harald Milchrahm1, Sara Shahzad1, Wolfgang Slany1,Martin Umgeher1, and Peter Wolkerstorfer21Institute for Software Technology, Technical University Graz, Austria,m3@ist.tugraz.at2CURE - Center for Usability Research & Engineeringwolkerstorfer@cure.at

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end-user tests

ing troubles common to technician-dominated development teamsand can be seen as a big success factor for our project

12 User interfaces for mobile content

Date of Publication: April 2006Author(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 A Device-Independent 3D User

  3D User Interfa

  fully prototype applic

    J. Gimeno, P. Morillo, I. Coma and M. Fern´ andezInstituto de Rob´ otica

13

Interface for Mobile Phones Based onMotion and Tracking Techniques

ce ation,performance evaluation, User Evaluation

Universidad de Valencia (Spain)E-mail: Jesus.Gimeno@uv.es

14 Software Engineering Issues forMobile Application Development

  software engineering research issues related to the development of applications that run on mobile devices

  Low Not Mentioned

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

15 Mobile Application Software Engineering: Challenges and Research Directions

  challenges to mobile

application software engineering and provides a discussion of possible research directions, drawin

  Low Not Mentioned

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

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g from

existing areas of software engineering, that should be further examined. Specifically, we examine the challenge of: 1) creating user interfaces accessible to differently-abled users; 2) handling the complexity of providing applications across multiple mobile platforms; 3)

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designing context-aware aware applications; and, 4) specifying requirements uncertainty.

16 Quality Attributes in mobile WebApplication Development

  The paper describes typical challenges in the development of mobile web application

          Axel Spriestersbach1, Thomas Springer21SAP-AG, Corporate Research, Germanyaxel.spriestersbach@sap.com2Dresden University of Technology, Germanyspringet@rn.inf.tu-dresden.de

17 Software Development Aspects of a

Mobile Food Ordering System

  food ordering application on mobile devices

  medium PROTOTYPE

     

18 Beyond Mobile Telephony Exploring Opportunities for Applications on the Mobile Phone

  the paper discusses the J2ME development environment

  Low Not Mentioned

    Shwetak N. Patel and Gregory D. Abowd College of Computing & GVU Center, 801 Atlantic Drive, Atlanta, GA 30332-0280, USA {shwetak, abowd}@cc.gatech.edu

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Handset for current mobile phones and demonstrate applications developed that respect the resource constraints while simultaneously exploiting the unique features of these commercially available devices

19 Cloud Computing in Mobile Applications

International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, Volume 2, Issue 8, August 2012 1 ISSN 2250-3153

mobile cloud computing

  Low Not Mentioned

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

20 Developing Mobile Learning

Informatica Economică vol. 14, no.

development of a

  Medium prototype

    Paul POCATILU Economic Informatics Department

17

Applications for Android using Web Services

3/2010 distributed mobile learning application for Android. The client application communicates with the server using Web services

Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romaniappaul@ase.ro

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

  paper presents a multiple case research concerning success factors and issues of mobile

field service implementations.

  Medium interviews

    Andreas Birkhofer, Sina Deibert und Franz Rothlauf

22 A GUI Crawling-based technique for Android

      Low Not Mentioned

    Domenico Amalfitano, Anna Rita Fasolino, Porfirio Tramontana domenico.amalfitano@unina.it,

18

Mobile Application Testing

anna.fasolino@unina.it, porfirio.tramontana@unina.it Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Napoli Federico II, Via Claudio 21, 80125 Napoli, Italy

23 Robust Gloves For 3D Interaction In Mobile Outdoor AR Environments

  design of hand-worn gloves for inter-acting with mobile outdoor augmented reality systems

  Low Not Mentioned

    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

24 Simple Collaborative Indoor-Outdoor Modelling Using Mobile Augmented Reality

  3D modelling with augmented reality (AR)

  Low Not Mentioned

    Wayne PiekarskiWearable 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/wayne

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