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Technische Universität München Towards Automated Detection of Mobile Usability Issues Dennis Pagano Daniel Bader

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 Modern usability evaluation – What should it be like? 2

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 1| Strong software support → Automation allows you to involve (more) real users 3

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 2| Continue after deployment →Context of use after delivery? 4

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 Our goal Automated detection of low discoverability usability issues at application runtime (and after deployment) 5

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 6 User can’t find certain UI controls → may not reach some of the app’s functionality One of the main UI challenges for touch-based mobile devices [Jakob Nielsen] Low Discoverability

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 Low discoverability example 7 Image source: http://android.cyrilmottier.com/?p=860

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 Our contribution ▪ A simple heuristic that detects low discoverability issues in mobile applications ▪ A sample implementation for iOS ▪ An evaluation of the heuristic’s performance 8

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 How the heuristic works ▪ Input: a sequence of view change events 9 View Change Event View Identifier Timestamp

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 How the heuristic works ▪ Input: a sequence of view change events 10 View Change Event View Change Event View Change Event View Change Event View Change Event View Change Event Time

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 How the heuristic works ▪ Look for problematic navigational patterns that indicate low discoverability issues 11 View Change Event View Change Event View Change Event View Change Event View Change Event View Change Event Time

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 Problematic navigational patterns 12 Navigational Loops The user visited at least one view several times in the last N view changes Low Retention Times The user visited each of the last N views only briefly Low Discoverability ∧

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 The framework ▪ A proof of concept implementation of the heuristic ▪ Easy to integrate into existing iOS applications – [[UsabilityTracker sharedTracker] enterView:@”Example”] ▪ Source code and demo project available 13

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 The framework 14

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 Evaluation results ▪ Is using such a simple heuristic worthwhile? ▪ How does it perform with a real application? ▪ How will it scale with respect to application complexity and number of users? 15

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 Evaluation results ▪ Evaluation setup: – 9 test users – a real world iPhone application of medium complexity →Promising results with respect to the simplicity of the approach • Precision = 0.61, Recall = 0.73 • MCC and Kappa Scores of ~ 0.66 16

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Technische Universität München 26.02.2013 ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano Outlook Scale is a double-edged sword → App complexity: ? → Many users: ✓ 17

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Technische Universität München 26.02.2013 ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano Outlook Scale is a double-edged sword → App complexity: ? → Many users: ✓ … may be used to complement existing approaches in the real world 18

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Technische Universität München ME’13 – Daniel Bader and Dennis Pagano 26.02.2013 Summary ▪ A simple way to detect usability issues at application runtime (even after deployment) ▪ Slides and sample implementation available at http://dbader.org/me13-paper ▪ Keep in touch with us on Twitter: – Daniel Bader: @dbader_org – Dennis Pagano: @dennispagano 19