Experience Report: Detecting Poor-Responsive UI in Android Applications

Good user interface (UI) design is key to successful mobile apps. UI latency, which can be considered as the time between the commencement of a UI operation and its intended UI update, is a critical consideration for app developers. Current literature still lacks a comprehensive study on how much UI latency a user can tolerate or how to identify UI design defects that cause intolerably long UI latency. As a result, bad UI apps are still common in app markets, leading to extensive user complaints. This paper examines user expectations of UI latency, anddevelops a tool to pinpoint intolerable UI latency in Android apps. To this end, we design an app to conduct a user survey of app UI latency. Through the survey, we find the tendency between user patience and UI latency. Therefore a timely screen update (e.g., loading animations) is critical to heavy-weighted UI operations (i.e. those that incur a long execution time before the final UI update is available). We then design a tool that, by monitoring the UI inputs and updates, can detect apps that do not follow this criterion. The survey and the tool are open-source released on-line. We also apply the tool to many real-world apps. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the tool in combating app UI design defects.

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