user centered design for mobile application an slr by zaheer ahmad - v1
DESCRIPTION
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.TRANSCRIPT
An SLR overview on User Centered Design (UCD) of Mobile Applications
Zaheer AhmadDepartment of Computer Science University of Peshawar
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.
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
2
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.
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 [email protected] 2Dresden University of Technology,
Germany [email protected]" "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 "
7
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 [email protected] Stavljanin School of Business Administration, University of Belgrade, [email protected]
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, [email protected] of Computer Sciences, Mathematics, and Engineering Shepherd University, [email protected]
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 [email protected], www.ist.tugraz.atPeter WolkerstorferCURE - Center for Usability Research & [email protected], 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 [email protected]
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 [email protected]
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., [email protected]
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
11
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, [email protected] - [email protected] - [email protected]
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,[email protected] - Center for Usability Research & [email protected]
12
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: [email protected]
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 [email protected]
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 [email protected], [email protected]
14
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, [email protected] University of Technology, [email protected]
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
16
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, [email protected]
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 [email protected],
18
Mobile Application Testing
[email protected], [email protected] 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 [email protected], [email protected]
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 [email protected], http://www.tinmith.net/wayne
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