20101013 - Kaveti, ...system for evaluating Mobile Web Usability

Design and implementation of a system for evaluating the mobile Web usability by Kaveti, Rajesh, M.S., University of Massachusetts Lowell, 2010 , 51 pages; AAT 1478732 My Interest: 1) Mobile web usability. 2) Usability analysis. 3) Elaboration on Design & Implementation. Action: To read the Dissertation in the future. Motivation Led by the rapid growth of the smartphone market, mobile Internet usage in US is expected to approach 100% penetration and to reach 50% total usage by 2013. The usability of the mobile Web, however, remains as a thorny issue. A recent study shows that the task completion rate using the mobile Web ranges from 38% to 75% on different phones. The average success rate was only 59%, substantially lower than the roughly 80% success rate when testing websites on a regular PC today. Thus it is important to conduct usability research that is specifically tailored for the mobile Web, which will help provide better user experience and make broader impacts on the fast-growing mobile industry. Research Goal In this thesis, we present the design and implementation of a data-collection system for mobile Web usability evaluation, which consists of the instrumented Web browser on the mobile phones for data collection and the back end server components for data analysis. Methodology We chose the iPhone as our mobile platform and we developed a Web browser with the same look and feel as the default Safari browser using the iPhone SDK. The instrumented Web browser passively collects user interaction events, such as URL clicks, soft key presses, and finger movements. GPS and accelerometer data are also collected to provide usage context. We have implemented simple timing and key error analysis, which can provide insights to mobile Web usability. Future Work In future work, we plan to implement additional analysis methods and extend our system to other mobile platforms. II. RELATED WORK:.... 6 III. SYSTEM DESIGN 9 IV. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION 12 The core application 12 UIApplication 12 The Application Delegate 13 Windows and Views 14 View Controllers 16 Event Handling 17 Text and Web 18 Instrumented Web Browser 19 Event Collection 25 Server Database 27 V. USABILITY ANALYSYS 30 VI. FEASIBILITY TESTING 34