Análise do contexto móvel nos testes de usabilidade de aplicações móveis

Abstract

As mobile devices become more popular there is a growing demand for the development of mobile services and applications. However, the development of this type of application has become an increasingly complex activity due to the limitations of mobile devices when compared with desktop computers. Due to these factors, testing mobile applications is progressively more important, particularly for the improvement of the quality of application usability. The usability test is a technique used to ensure an application’s ease of use by requesting a user to employ the device and observing how (s)he reacts to it. Several works found in literature state that while carrying out usability tests of mobile devices, the characteristics of the mobile context must be considered when evaluating the test results. This is due to the conjecture that the mobile context exerts influence on the usability tests. The objective of this work is to present an analysis of the influence of mobile context on the results of usability testing on mobile applications. In order to carry out this investigation a test of the mobile Twitter application was conducted, and the mobile context in the course of the test was registered. The flow of user interaction with the application, as well as the mobile context (e.g., location, velocity, luminosity and proximity), were both gathered automatically by means of an application developed during this work. Test results show that the user performance index is adversely affected depending on the mobile context in which the user is inserted.