Usability of mobile applications: literature review and rationale for a new usability model

TLDR

Mobile device use has surged, yet usability has suffered because prevailing models emphasize only effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction while overlooking factors such as cognitive load. The authors propose the PACMAD model to address these gaps in mobile usability assessment. PACMAD integrates key attributes from existing models and was applied to a literature review of mobile app studies to evaluate their comprehensiveness. The review revealed that current models focus on three attributes and that neglecting others can result in incomplete usability evaluations.

Abstract

The usefulness of mobile devices has increased greatly in recent years allowing users to perform more tasks in a mobile context. This increase in usefulness has come at the expense of the usability of these devices in some contexts. We conducted a small review of mobile usability models and found that usability is usually measured in terms of three attributes; effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. Other attributes, such as cognitive load, tend to be overlooked in the usability models that are most prominent despite their likely impact on the success or failure of an application. To remedy this we introduces the PACMAD (People At the Centre of Mobile Application Development) usability model which was designed to address the limitations of existing usability models when applied to mobile devices. PACMAD brings together significant attributes from different usability models in order to create a more comprehensive model. None of the attributes that it includes are new, but the existing prominent usability models ignore one or more of them. This could lead to an incomplete usability evaluation. We performed a literature search to compile a collection of studies that evaluate mobile applications and then evaluated the studies using our model.