Honors Theses and Capstones
Date of Award
Spring 2015
Project Type
Senior Honors Thesis
College or School
CEPS
Department
Computer Science
Program or Major
Computer Science
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science
First Advisor
Karen Jin
Abstract
Software usability testing is a key methodology that ensures applications are intuitive and easy to use for the target audience. Usability testing has direct benefits for companies as usability improvements often are fundamental to the success of a product. A standard usability test study includes the following five steps: obtain suitable participants, design test scripts, conduct usability sessions, interpret test outcomes, and produce recommendations. Due to the increasing importance for more usable applications, effective techniques to develop usable products, as well as technologies to improve usability testing, have been widely utilized. However, as companies are developing more cross-platform web and mobile apps, traditional single-platform usability testing has shortcomings with respect to ensuring a uniform user experience. In this report, a new strategy is proposed to promote a consistent user experience across all application versions and platforms. This method integrates the testing of different application versions, e.g., the website, mobile app, mobile website. Participants are recruited with a better-defined criterion according to their preferred devices. The usability session is conducted iteratively on several different devices, and the test results of individual application versions are compared on a per-device basis to improve the test outcomes. This strategy is expected to extend on current practices for usability testing by incorporating cross-platform consistency of software versions on most devices.
Recommended Citation
Black, Spencer W., "Current Practices for Product Usability Testing in Web and Mobile Applications" (2015). Honors Theses and Capstones. 226.
https://scholars.unh.edu/honors/226