Exploiting Context-Awareness for Usability Evaluation in Mobile HCI
Karin Anna Hummel, Bettina Thurnher, Thomas Grill, R. Weigl · 2006
The widespread use of mobile devices, like smart phones and PDAs, in domains like mobile work, mobile learning, and emergency services envisions a growing market for new applications. Such applications require usability testing with particular focus on constantly changing environments and interactions. Desktop applications are usually tested in laboratory environments in order to restrict influencing factors during the experiments (in-vitro studies). For mobile applications we consider additional parameters representing the user’s context in order to explicitly include a broader spectrum of influencing attributes in evaluation scenarios. In this paper, we propose an enhanced usability evaluation method that uses a framework for tracking context parameters during usability evaluations. We demonstrate how context parameters based on the human senses can be modeled. In order to track context parameters the framework uses sensor technology implemented on mobile devices. The sensed data is collected by the framework and used in the evaluation phase of mobile usability testing. The proposed method enhances usability tests by avoiding additional distraction of subjects caused by observers. Additionally, this method exhibits high potential for explaining phenomena occurring during mobile usability tests that could not have been explained by traditional in-situ methods.