Emmanuel O. C. Mkpojiogu

Usability evaluation techniques in mobile commerce applications: A systematic review

Obviously, there are a number of literatures concerning the usability of mobile commerce (m-commerce) applications and related areas, but they do not adequately provide knowledge about usability techniques used in most of the empirical usability evaluation for m-commerce application. Therefore, this paper is aimed at producing the usability techniques frequently used in the aspect of usability evaluation for m-commerce applications. To achieve the stated objective, systematic literature review was employed. Sixty seven papers were downloaded in usability evaluation for m-commerce and related areas; twenty one most relevant studies were selected for review in order to extract the appropriate information. The results from the review shows that heuristic evaluation, formal test and think aloud methods are the most commonly used methods in m-commerce application in comparison to cognitive walkthrough and the informal test methods. Moreover, most of the studies applied control experiment (33.3% of the total studies); other studies that applied case study for usability evaluation are 14.28%. The results from this paper provide additional knowledge to the usability practitioners and research community for the current state and use of usability techniques in m-commerce application.

Requirements: Towards an understanding on why software projects fail

Requirement engineering is at the foundation of every successful software project. There are many reasons for software project failures; however, poorly engineered requirements process contributes immensely to the reason why software projects fail. Software project failure is usually costly and risky and could also be life threatening. Projects that undermine requirements engineering suffer or are likely to suffer from failures, challenges and other attending risks. The cost of project failures and overruns when estimated is very huge. Furthermore, software project failures or overruns pose a challenge in today’s competitive market environment. It affects the company’s image, goodwill, and revenue drive and decreases the perceived satisfaction of customers and clients. In this paper, requirements engineering was discussed. Its role in software projects success was elaborated. The place of software requirements process in relation to software project failure was explored and examined. Also, project success and failure factors were also discussed with emphasis placed on requirements factors as they play a major role in software projects’ challenges, successes and failures. The paper relied on secondary data and empirical statistics to explore and examine factors responsible for the successes, challenges and failures of software projects in large, medium and small scaled software companies.

A user experience evaluation of Amazon Kindle mobile application

There is a dramatic increase in the development of mobile applications in recent years. This makes the usability evaluation of these mobile applications an important aspect in the advancement and application of technology. In this paper, a laboratory-based usability evaluation was carried out on the Amazon Kindle app using 15 users who performed 5 tasks on the Kindle e-book mobile app. A post-test questionnaire was administered to elicit users’ perception on the usability of the application. The results demonstrate that almost all the participants were satisfied with services provided by the Amazon Kindle e-book mobile app. On all the four user experience factors examined, namely, perceived ease-of-use, perceived visibility, perceived enjoyabilty, and perceived efficiency, the evaluation outcome shows that the participants had a good and rich mobile experience with the application.

Assessing the usability of Shazam mobile app

Like searching for a “needle” in a “haystack”, suppose that there is a large set of signals (finite sequences of numbers) fs1; s2; s3; g, and a special signal q that may or may not be in the collection. How can the signals be found in the collection that is similar, or identical to q, and how can this be done quickly? A solution to this question is the basis of the Shazam smart phone app, where a listener captures a short excerpt of a recorded song with the smart phone’s microphone, and in a matter of moments the app reports the name of the song and the artist. Here, the “needle” is the excerpt, and the “haystack” is a vast corpus of popular music. The Shazam algorithm is powered by Fourier analysis. This paper presents a report on a usability evaluation of Amazon Shazam app. The researchers present the outcome based on a task-based evaluation that involved 15 users of different level of experience who performed 5 tasks using the Shazam mobile app. Post-test questionnaire was used to capture users’ percep...

Requirements model for an e-Health awareness portal

Requirements engineering is at the heart and foundation of software engineering process. Poor quality requirements inevitably lead to poor quality software solutions. Also, poor requirement modeling is tantamount to designing a poor quality product. So, quality assured requirements development collaborates fine with usable products in giving the software product the needed quality it demands. In the light of the foregoing, the requirements for an e-Ebola Awareness Portal were modeled with a good attention given to these software engineering concerns. The requirements for the e-Health Awareness Portal are modeled as a contribution to the fight against Ebola and helps in the fulfillment of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goal No. 6. In this study requirements were modeled using UML 2.0 modeling technique.

Assessing the influence of self-reported requirements importance on the perceived quality of proposed software products

Customer satisfaction is highly associated with product quality.The perceived quality of products serves as a driver for the loyalty of customers and also promotes high profitability, viability of products and return on investment. Therefore, understanding the importance of requirements as it is associated with the satisfaction of users or customers when their requirements are fulfilled is worth the stress considering.So many studies have been done on customer satisfaction in relation to the importance of requirements, but the correlation between customer satisfaction coefficients of the Kano model and users or customers reported requirements importance have not been sufficiently examined. In this study, an attempt is made to investigate the influence of customer reported requirements importance on the perceived quality of proposed software products. The result of the study indicates a significant relationship between the reported requirement importance and perceived quality of proposed software products. Since customer satisfaction (perceived quality) is directly related to the reported requirements importance, it is therefore essential to give adequate place to user or customer satisfying the requirements (features) all through the software development lifecycle as this enhances the products perceived quality.

A systematic review of usability test metrics for mobile video streaming apps

This paper presents the results of a systematic review regarding the usability test metrics for mobile video streaming apps. In the study, 238 studies were found, but only 51 relevant papers were eventually selected for the review. The study reveals that time taken for video streaming and the video quality were the two most popular metrics used in the usability tests for mobile video streaming apps. Besides, most of the studies concentrated on the usability of mobile TV as users are switching from traditional TV to mobile TV.

A usability evaluation of Lazada mobile application

This paper reports on a usability evaluation of Lazada mobile application, an online shopping app for mobile devices. The evaluation was conducted using 12 users of ages 18 to 24. Seven (7) were expert users and the other 5 were novice users. The study objectives were to evaluate the perceived effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction of the mobile application. The result provides a positive feedback and shows that the mobile shopping app is effective, efficient, and satisfying as perceived by the study participants. However, there are some observed usability issues with the main menu and the payment method that necessitates improvements to increase the application’s effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. The suggested improvements include: 1) the main menu should be capitalized and place on the left side of mobile app and 2) payment method tutorial should be included as a hyperlink in the payment method page. This observation will be helpful to the owners of the application in future version develo...

Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment as drivers for the user acceptance of interactive mobile maps

This study examines the user perception of usefulness, ease of use and enjoyment as drivers for the users’ complex interaction with map on mobile devices. TAM model was used to evaluate users’ intention to use and their acceptance of interactive mobile map using the above three beliefs as antecedents. Quantitative research (survey) methodology was employed and the analysis and findings showed that all the three explanatory variables used in this study, explain the variability in the user acceptance of interactive mobile map technology. Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived enjoyment each have significant positive influence on user acceptance of interactive mobile maps. This study further validates the TAM model.

Assessing Experimental Private Cloud Using Web of System Performance Model

Cloudcomputinghasattracted theattentionofeducational and research institutionsasaway to supportmoderntrendsinteachingandlearning.Thisarticledescribestheperformanceassessment ofaprivatecloudwithinauniversityenvironmentusingtheWebofSystemPerformance(WOSP) model.Asurveywascarriedout tomeasure therespondents’attitude towards theuseofprivate cloudinwhichstudentsandexpertsserveassample.Testingwasconductedbydesigningavirtual labconsistingofanumberofvirtualmachinesoperatedbyaselectedsample.Theresultsshowed that theusageofcloudcomputinginuniversityhasgoodperceivedsystemperformancejudging fromhowitfaresintheconstituentpartsoftheWOSPmodel.Furthermore,thestudyrevealedthat usabilityandflexibilityoutperformedcriterionlikesecurity.Moreover,severalnon-functionalcriteria outperformedfunctionality.Inshort,theknowledgeandresultspresentedfromassessingaprivate cloudusingWOSPmodelcouldbebeneficialforusers,designersandmanagersofprivateclouds especiallyinuniversities. KEyWoRdS Cloud Computing, Educational Technology, OpenStack, WOSP Model