Perspectives on usability guidelines for smartphone applications: An empirical investigation and systematic literature review

ContextSeveral usability guidelines have been proposed to improve the usability of smartphone apps. These guidelines can be classified into three disjoint sets: platform specific guidelines, genre specific guidelines, and generic guidelines. However, smartphone applications are usually developed for multiple platforms and targeted for a variety of users. Hence the usefulness of existing guidelines is severally limited. ObjectiveThis study aims to develop a comprehensive list of usability guidelines suitable for multiple platforms and genres of smartphone applications. MethodA controlled experiment was conducted, and it highlighted that even popular and established apps have usability problems. In order to identify different perspectives on usability a systematic literature review was conducted. ResultsSystematic literature review resulted in 148 studies that proposed a total of 359 usability guidelines. These guidelines were condensed into 25 guidelines in 7 categories by removing redundancy, repetition and similarity through a sequential and iterative process. Finally, usefulness of the proposed classification of guidelines is established by mapping these to usability issues identified earlier.

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