Userbility: uma técnica para avaliação da experiência do usuário e usabilidade em aplicativos móveis

Abstract

After the great increase in the use of mobile devices, user experience (UX) has become much discussed as it covers the relationship of usability, context and user emotions about the applications. Usability and UX are some of the most important factors for evaluating the quality of mobile applications. They focus on how easy is to use an ap-plication and the emotions that such use evokes. However, these aspects are often eval-uated separately in industry through different evaluation techniques. Although it is pos-sible to identify more usability and UX problems by employing different UX and usa-bility evaluation methods, this distributed approach may not be cost effective and may not allow to thoroughly explore the identified issues. Furthermore, a specific technique for mobile applications evaluation may to provide better feedback than a traditional ap-proach. The aim of the research is to integrate the usability evaluation and the user ex-perience to evaluate mobile applications during development. Thus, this thesis presents the Userbility technique (User Experience Integration - Usability) with twelve simpli-fied aspects related to the heuristics for mobile applications and we integrated these as-pects with UX issues relating to the user feels, thinks and their satisfaction about the appearance of the heuristics discussed. The main idea is to propose Userbility tech-nique, to help evaluation of the user experience for every aspect of heuristics. In order to support the Userbility technique, we conducted experimental studies. These studies consists of: (a) a pilot study, prior to performing a real study in order to understand what points and evaluate possible changes in the study; (b) an initial study to check the feasi-bility of Userbility v1.0 technique and what parts needed improvements; and (c) an em-pirical study to evaluate the Userbility v 2.0 technique to verify its feasibility, compar-ing the Userbility technique with existing approach (UX and Usability Guidelines Ap-proach - UUGA). The ultimate goal of this research is to integrate the UX and usability evaluation in order to support detection of problems in mobile applications.