Abstract
Context Several usability guidelines have been proposed to improve the usability of smartphone apps. These guidelines can be classified into three disjoint sets: platform specific guidelines, genre specific guidelines, and generic guidelines. However, smartphone applications are usually developed for multiple platforms and targeted for a variety of users. Hence the usefulness of existing guidelines is severally limited.
Objective: This study aims to develop a comprehensive list of usability guidelines suitable for multiple platforms and genres of smartphone applications.
Method: A controlled experiment was conducted, and it highlighted that even popular and established apps have usability problems. In order to identify different perspectives on usability a systematic literature review was conducted.
Results: Systematic literature review resulted in 148 studies that proposed a total of 359 usability guidelines. These guidelines were condensed into 25 guidelines in 7 categories by removing redundancy, repetition and similarity through a sequential and iterative process. Finally, usefulness of the proposed classification of guidelines is established by mapping these to usability issues identified earlier.