A Usability Evaluation of M-commerce Apps

Abstract

In today’s era, Internet has become an increasingly popular technology globally. Huge numbers of websites and applications have been developed and majority of them are selling products over the internet. Even with the availability of a large number of M-commerce applications, still the target audiences of these M-commerce applications such as students, office employees, housewives, who need a mobile application to do their online shopping, are not using them efficiently due to usability issues encountered at user interfaces of m-commerce applications. This is because of poor interface design along with neglected usability guidelines that are provided by various researchers and essentially followed by standardize companies like Apple and Google. Therefore, it is highly recommended that the interface of such a system should be explored through different stakeholders by considering numerous parameters and criteria. To tackle UX/UI problems well, this study is conducted to aim the usability improvement of m-commerce applications and for the same, two popular applications, Daraz and Elo, is selected by considering current download rate and positive reviews. They are considered as top ranked m-commerce applications, working successfully in Pakistan for the year 2020. However, some usability problems were noticed for these Apps and were reported in the reviews of the application too. So, these problems are addressed and targeted to filter out the most significant issues in usability. The methodology used for evaluation and analysis of the currently available m-commerce applications was heuristic evaluation (from expert users) and user testing (from novice users) based upon the integrated usability guidelines proposed by different usability experts.   The research finding concluded the three significant criteria which are error prevention, aesthetic and minimalist design, and help & documentation. Further, different decision making techniques will be applied to attain user satisfied m-commerce platforms through prototype design in near future.