Open Access
Subscription Access
Usability Testing of Fitness Mobile Application:Case Study Aded Surat App
Obesity is a major health problem around the world. Saudi Arabia is a nation where obesity is increasing at an alarming rate. Mobile apps could help obese individuals but they need to be usable and personalized to be adopted by those users. This paper aims at testing the usability of a fitness mobile app” Aded Surat”, an app in Arabic language. This paper presents an extensive literature review on the attributes that improve the usability of fitness apps. Then, it explains our methodology and our set up of a trial to test the usability of Aded Surat app that is popular in Saudi Arabia. The usability attributes tested are effectiveness, efficiency, satisfaction, memorability, errors, learnability and cognitive load. The trial is done in collaboration with participants from the Armed Forces Hospitals - Taif Region in Saudi Arabia. The results highlight that the app failed to meet with the usability attributes.
Keywords
Usability, Mobile Application, Obesity, User Experience.
User
Font Size
Information
- A. P. SIMOPOULOS and T. B. VAN ITALLIE, "Body weight, health, and longevity," Annals of internal medicine, vol. 100, pp. 285-295, 1984.
- W. H. Organization. (2016, 2 October). Obesity and overweight. Available: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs311/en/
- O. R. Center. (2016, 10 October). Obesity in Saudi Arabia. Available: https://www.obesitycenter.edu.sa/pages/patients.aspx?id=258
- A. Afshin, M. H. Forouzanfar, M. B. Reitsma, P. Sur, K. Estep, A. Lee, et al., "Health Effects of Overweight and Obesity in 195 Countries over 25 Years," The New England journal of medicine, vol. 377, pp. 13-27, 2017.
- K. Singer and C. N. Lumeng, "The initiation of metabolic inflammation in childhood obesity," The Journal of clinical investigation, vol. 127, pp. 65-73, 2017.
- K. R. Fontaine, D. T. Redden, C. Wang, A. O. Westfall, and D. B. Allison, "Years of life lost due to obesity," Jama, vol. 289, pp. 187-193, 2003.
- J. Stevens, J. Cai, E. R. Pamuk, D. F. Williamson, M. J. Thun, and J. L. Wood, "The effect of age on the association between body-mass index and mortality," New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 338, pp. 1-7, 1998.
- E. E. Calle, M. J. Thun, J. M. Petrelli, C. Rodriguez, and C. W. Heath Jr, "Body-mass index and mortality in a prospective cohort of US adults," New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 341, pp. 1097-1105, 1999.
- C. Summerbell, E. Waters, L. Edmunds, S. Kelly, T. Brown, and K. Campbell, "Interventions for preventing obesity in children (Review)," Cochrane library, vol. 3, pp. 1-71, 2005.
- W. Saris, S. Blair, M. Van Baak, S. Eaton, P. Davies, L. Di Pietro, et al., "How much physical activity is enough to prevent unhealthy weight gain? Outcome of the IASO 1st Stock Conference and consensus statement," Obesity reviews, vol. 4, pp. 101-114, 2003.
- O. Bar-Or, "Juvenile obesity, physical activity, and lifestyle changes: Cornerstones for prevention and management," The physician and sportsmedicine, vol. 28, pp. 51-58, 2000.
- J. L. Anderson, E. M. Antman, S. R. Bailey, E. R. Bates, J. C. Blankenship, D. E. Casey Jr, et al., "AHA Scientific Statement," Circulation, vol. 120, pp. 2271-2306, 2009.
- J. O. Hill and H. R. Wyatt, "Role of physical activity in preventing and treating obesity," Journal of Applied Physiology, vol. 99, pp. 765-770, 2005.
- J. O. Hill and J. C. Peters, "Environmental contributions to the obesity epidemic," Science, vol. 280, pp. 1371-1374, 1998.
- I. Contento, G. I. Balch, Y. L. Bronner, L. Lytle, S. Maloney, C. Olson, et al., "The effectiveness of nutrition education and implications for nutrition education policy, programs, and research: a review of research," Journal of nutrition education (USA), 1995.
- G. D. Foster, A. P. Makris, and B. A. Bailer, "Behavioral treatment of obesity," The American journal of clinical nutrition, vol. 82, pp. 230S-235S, 2005.
- T. A. Wadden and A. J. Stunkard, Handbook of obesity treatment: Guilford Press, 2002.
- K. D. Brownell, LEARN program for weight management 2000: American Health, 2000.
- J. Yang, "Toward physical activity diary: motion recognition using simple acceleration features with mobile phones," in Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Interactive multimedia for consumer electronics, 2009, pp. 1-10.
- T. Denning, A. Andrew, R. Chaudhri, C. Hartung, J. Lester, G. Borriello, et al., "BALANCE: towards a usable pervasive wellness application with accurate activity inference," in Proceedings of the 10th workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 2009, p. 5.
- S. M. Arteaga, M. Kudeki, A. Woodworth, and S. Kurniawan, "Mobile system to motivate teenagers' physical activity," in Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Interaction Design and Children, 2010, pp. 1-10.
- D. E. Conroy, C.-H. Yang, and J. P. Maher, "Behavior change techniques in top-ranked mobile apps for physical activity," American journal of preventive medicine, vol. 46, pp. 649-652, 2014.
- F. Raben and E. Snip, "The MENAP region is developing, but can it keep its promise?," Research World, vol. 2014, pp. 6-11, 2014.
- Statista. (2017, 8 March). Number of smartphone users in Saudi Arabia from 2014 to 2021 (in millions)*. Available: https://www.statista.com/statistics/494616/smartphone-users-in-saudi-arabia/
- D. LLP. (2012, 2 February). So Many Apps -- So Little To Download. Available: http://www.mondaq.com/x/192692/IT+internet/So+Many+Apps+So+Little+To+Dow%20nload
- S. Dredge, "Most branded apps are a flop says Deloitte. But why," ed, 2011.
- M. Bhuiyan, A. Zaman, and M. H. Miraz, "Usability Evaluation of a Mobile Application in Extraordinary Environment for Extraordinary People," arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.04653, 2017.
- R. Youens. (2011, 2 February). 7 Habits of Highly Effective Apps. Available: https://gigaom.com/2011/07/16/7-habits-of-highly-effective-apps/
- I. Nascimento, W. Silva, A. Lopes, L. Rivero, B. Gadelha, E. Oliveira, et al., "An Empirical Study to Evaluate the Feasibility of a UX and Usability Inspection Technique for Mobile Applications," in 28th International Conference on Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering, California, USA, 2016.
- H. Hoehle, R. Aljafari, and V. Venkatesh, "Leveraging Microsoft ׳ s mobile usability guidelines: Conceptualizing and developing scales for mobile application usability," International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, vol. 89, pp. 35-53, 2016.
- S. Pagoto, K. Schneider, M. Jojic, M. DeBiasse, and D. Mann, "Evidence-based strategies in weightloss mobile apps," American journal of preventive medicine, vol. 45, pp. 576-582, 2013.
- A. C. King, E. B. Hekler, L. A. Grieco, S. J. Winter, J. L. Sheats, M. P. Buman, et al., "Harnessing different motivational frames via mobile phones to promote daily physical activity and reduce sedentary behavior in aging adults," PloS one, vol. 8, p. e62613, 2013.
- A. A. Alnasser, R. E. Amalraj, A. Sathiaseelan, A. S. Al-Khalifa, and D. Marais, "Do Arabic weightloss apps adhere to evidence-informed practices?," Translational behavioral medicine, vol. 6, pp. 396-402, 2016.
- E. R. Breton, B. F. Fuemmeler, and L. C. Abroms, "Weight loss—there is an app for that! But does it adhere to evidence-informed practices?," Translational behavioral medicine, vol. 1, pp. 523-529, 2011.
- A. M. Content. (2016, 5 January). Adad Alsorat from Hmiate Available: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/dad-als-rat-alhraryt-w-mraqbt/id908026885?mt=8
- Hmiate. (2016, 5 January). Adad Alsorat from Hmiate. Available: http://m-diet.com/Home/Tracker
- G. Play. (2016, 5 January). Adad Alsorat from Hmiate Available: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mdiet.tracker&hl=ar
- R. Baharuddin, D. Singh, and R. Razali, "Usability dimensions for mobile applications—A review," Res. J. Appl. Sci. Eng. Technol, vol. 5, pp. 2225-2231, 2013.
- W. ISO, "9241-11. Ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals (VDTs)," The international organization for standardization, vol. 45, 1998.
- S. Ben and C. Plaisant, "Designing the user interface 4 th edition," ed: Pearson Addison Wesley, USA, 2005.
- E. Folmer and J. Bosch, "Architecting for usability: a survey," Journal of systems and software, vol. 70, pp. 61-78, 2004.
- D. Saffer, "Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices," New Riders Press,< http://www. designingforinteraction. com, vol. 2, p. 2.1, 2007.
- W. Albert and T. Tullis, Measuring the user experience: collecting, analyzing, and presenting usability metrics: Newnes, 2013.
- K. D. Eason, "Towards the experimental study of usability," Behaviour & Information Technology, vol. 3, pp. 133-143, 1984.
- A. Dix, S. Cairncross, G. Cockton, R. Beale, R. St Amant, and M. Hause, "Human-Computer Interaction," 1993.
- J. Nielsen, Usability engineering: Elsevier, 1994.
- A. Abran, A. Khelifi, W. Suryn, and A. Seffah, "Usability meanings and interpretations in ISO standards," Software Quality Journal, vol. 11, pp. 325-338, 2003.
- D. Norman, "The Design of Everyday Things Basic Books New York," 2002.
- S. Ben and C. Plaisant, "Designing the user interface 4 th edition," ed: Pearson Addison Wesley, USA, 2005.
- C. Yeh, "The principles of interaction design in the post-digital age," Taipei: ARTIST-MAGAZINE, 2010.
- C.-M. Wang and C.-H. Huang, "A study of usability principles and interface design for mobile ebooks," Ergonomics, vol. 58, pp. 1253-1265, 2015.
- R. Alturki and V. Gay, "USABILITY TESTING OF FITNESS MOBILE APPLICATION: METHODOLOGY AND QUANTITATIVE RESULTS," presented at the 7th International Conference on Computer Science, Engineering & Applications (ICCSEA 2017), Copenhagen, Denmark, 2017.
- J. Mifsud. (2015, 3 November). Usability Metrics – A Guide To Quantify The Usability Of Any System. Available: http://usabilitygeek.com/usability-metrics-a-guide-to-quantify-system-usability/
- J. Sauro. (2010, 9 December). IF YOU COULD ONLY ASK ONE QUESTION, USE THIS ONE. Available: https://measuringu.com/single-question/
- A. Garcia. (2013, 18 October). UX Research | Standardized Usability Questionnaire. Available: https://chaione.com/blog/ux-research-standardizing-usability-questionnaires/
- J. P. Tracy and M. J. Albers, "Measuring cognitive load to test the usability of web sites," in Annual Conference-society for technical communication, 2006, p. 256.
- S. G. Hart and L. E. Staveland, "Development of NASA-TLX (Task Load Index): Results of empirical and theoretical research," Advances in psychology, vol. 52, pp. 139-183, 1988.
- J. Sauro. (2013, 1 December). HOW TO MEASURE LEARNABILITY. Available: https://measuringu.com/measure-learnability/
- J. Sauro. (2011, 4 December ). 10 ESSENTIAL USABILITY METRICS. Available: https://measuringu.com/essential-metrics/
- R. Harrison, D. Flood, and D. Duce, "Usability of mobile applications: literature review and rationale for a new usability model," Journal of Interaction Science, vol. 1, pp. 1-16, 2013.
- C. Walsh. (2015, 6 November). A Guide To Simple And Painless Mobile User Testing. Available: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/12/simple-and-painless-mobile-user-testing/
- J. Mifsud. (2016, 3 November). Usability Testing Of Mobile Applications: A Step-By-Step Guide. Available: http://usabilitygeek.com/usability-testing-mobile-applications/
Abstract Views: 326
PDF Views: 186