A survey on factors influencing mobile application usability through the lens of PACMAD+3 model
This research addresses mobile usability for HCI researchers and practitioners, but it is incremental as it operationalizes an existing model without introducing new methods.
This study empirically evaluated the PACMAD+3 model's factors influencing mobile application usability through a survey of 838 users, finding that users rated efficiency as highly important and seven other factors as moderately important.
Undeniably, the advent of mobile applications has brought new frontiers to usability engineering. To date, ongoing research has shown significant efforts to adopt and adapt usability principles to the mobile computing environment. One of these endeavors is the PACMAD+3 model. However, to the best of our knowledge, little or no effort has been made to empirically evaluate these factors against perceived influence. With this in mind, the objective of this study is to explore this issue. To achieve this goal in a reliable and reproducible manner, we took advantage of previous attempts to conceptualize the mobile usability factors, but we contribute by operationalizing these theoretical constructs into observable and measurable phenomena. In this sense, the survey was designed and carried out on a sample of 838 users to assess the significance of the PACMAD+3 factors on the perceived usability of mobile applications. Our findings show that, on average, users rated efficiency as highly important, while the remaining seven, namely: cognitive load, errors, learnability, operability, effectiveness, memorability, and understandability, were rated moderately important. Insights into the importance of usability factors and the corresponding features can also facilitate the design and development of mobile applications. Therefore, our research contributes to the field of human-computer interaction with theoretical and practical implications for mobile usability researchers, UX designers, and quality assurance engineers.