Empirical Studies on the Relation between User Interface Design and Perceived Quality of Android Applications

Abstract

The number of mobile applications has increased drastically in the past few years. According to the statistics, it is estimated that 167 billion mobile applications will be downloaded by 2015. However, some applications are superior to the others in terms of user-perceived quality. User-perceived quality can be defined as the user's opinion of a product. For mobile applications, it can be quantified by the number of downloads and ratings. Earlier studies suggested that user interface (UI) design is one of the major reasons that can affect the user-perceived quality of mobile applications. UI design is relatively a complex concept by its nature. In this thesis, we try to examine the affect of UI design on user-perceived quality by focusing on two different aspects of UI, namely UI complexity and UI reuse. We carry out our case studies on 1,292 Android applications from the Android market (i.e., Google Play). We find that our measurement of UI complexity quantified by the number of inputs and outputs confirms the findings of previous studies on UI complexity. UI complexity can affect the user-perceived quality, and we are able to provide guidelines for the proper amount of UI complexity that helps an application achieve high user-perceived quality. We observe that UI of mobile applications are widely reused among and across different mobile categories. Frequently used UI elements with certain characteristics can provide high user-perceived quality. Finally, we are able to extract practical UI templates with high user-perceived quality for developers to design UIs with high quality. Developers and quality assurance personnel can use our guidelines to improve the quality of mobile applications.