An Evaluation Model for Measuring the Usability of Mobile Office Applications through User Interface Design Metrics

Abstract

Usage of mobile devices and particularly smart phones has seen an enormous hike due to the advancement of mobile phone technology in recent times. People of different age groups, one way or the other, are now connected to different mobile phone applications, such as, Social Networking, Chatting, VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) applications, Gaming etc. This rapid advancement has made it necessary for user interface designers of mobile applications to design user friendly interfaces for their applications, so that users can interact and use those applications with ease irrespective of their location. Usability plays a vital role for measuring the usefulness of such applications. After examining different experimental studies on usability assessment techniques imparted by various research workers, it has been determined that there is still a great deal of requirement where application designers have to guarantee more adept and improved usability of offline mobile applications, such as, Conversion Apps, offline encyclopedia, Translation apps, business use applications (office applications) etc. The primary objective of this study is to render a model for usability metrics of measuring the usability of office applications for smart phones. The effectiveness, usefulness and reliability of the proposed model is measured through two office applications named Office Suite Pro7 for Android and Office 365 for Windows 8 touch screen Smartphone.The results of usability testing and t-test show the significance of the proposed approach. The model in this study will enable the application designers to guarantee a more adept and enhanced usability of office applications for smart phones during the designing stage.