Bad Symptoms for Usability of Mobile Applications

Usability is one of highly prioritized qualities of mobile applications. However, the quantitative metrics to measure the usability of mobile application are very limited. In this paper, we propose a method to detect bad symptoms that hinder usability of mobile applications. A bad symptom could be captured when monitored users´ behavior on mobile application is different from the behavior designed by designer. Monitoring users´ behavior model is done by analyzing logs which are generated when a user does something on mobile phone. We defined five types of bad symptoms and illustrated examples for each one. Usability of mobile application can be quantitatively measured by the number of detected bad symptoms.