User Interface Matters: : Analysing the Complexity of Mobile Applications from a Visual Perspective
Abstract
Product-centric techniques to analyze mobile applications leverage traditional source code analysis, size, market success, complexity, and others. Many of these techniques converge in the strategy of evaluating metrics taken from the source code that delivers the functionality of the software product. However, when following the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture, mobile applications are typically constructed by a compound of at least two programming languages, one to deliver the functionality and the other to describe the visual aspects. The latter is commonly left out from source code analysis, even though critical parts of the application are present in the graphic User Interface (UI). In this paper, we identify an opportunity to strengthen the product-centric mobile app analysis by incorporating UI metrics. This approach aims to enhance the expressiveness of source code metrics and deliver a more comprehensive analysis of the complexity, maintainability, and effort estimation of a mobile app. To introduce the concept, we present a case study realized using a block-based programming language to create mobile apps, in which we describe and calculate functional and UI metrics, discover commonalities and differences, discuss traits, and open tracks for further research.
References
[1]
Adak M.F., Studies on usability of mobile applications, Global Journal on Technology (2014) 6.
[2]
Albert, W., Tullis, T., 2013. Measuring the user experience: collecting, analyzing, and presenting usability metrics. Newnes.
[3]
Catolino, G., 2018. Does source code quality reflect the ratings of apps?, in: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. pp. 43–4.
[4]
Catolino, G., Salza, P., Gravino, C, Ferrucci, R, 2017. A set of metrics for the effort estimation of mobile apps, in: 2017 IEEE/ACM 4th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft), IEEE. pp. 194–198.
[5]
Corral, L., Fronza, I., 2015. Better code for better apps: A study on source code quality and market success of android applications, in: 2015 2nd ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, IEEE. pp. 22–32.
[6]
Ferrucci, F, Gravino, C, Salza, P., Sarro, E, 2015. Investigating functional and code size measures for mobile applications, in: 2015 41st Euromicro Conference on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications, IEEE. pp. 365–368.
[7]
Harrison R., Flood D., Duce D., Usability of mobile applications: literature review and rationale for a new usability model, Journal of Interaction Science 1 (2013) 1.
[8]
Hilbert D.M., Redmiles D.F., Extracting usability information from user interface events, ACM Computing Surveys 32 (2000) 384–421.
[9]
Kaur, A., Kaur, K., Kaur, H., 2015. An investigation of the accuracy of code and process metrics for defect prediction of mobile applications, in: 2015 4th International Conference on Reliability, Infocom Technologies and Optimization (Trends and Future Directions), pp. 1–6.
[10]
Kinnunen, P., 2020. Creating a Visual Learning Environment to Introduce Programming and Robotics to Children. Master’s thesis, University of Helsinki, Finland.
[11]
Krasner G.E., Pope S.T., A description of the model-view-controller user interface paradigm in the smalltalk-80 system, Journal of object oriented programming 1 (1988) 26–29.
[12]
Ma X., Yan B., Chen G., Zhang C., Huang K., Drury J., Wang L., Design and implementation of a toolkit for usability testing of mobile apps, Mobile Networks and Applications 18 (2013) 81–97.
[13]
Mamun M.A.A., Berger C., Hansson J., Effects of measurements on correlations of software code metrics, Empirical Software Engineering 24 (2019) 2764–2818.
[14]
Martin W., Sarro E., Jia Y., Zhang Y., Harman M., A survey of app store analysis for software engineering, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 43 (2017) 817–847.
[15]
McCabe, T.J., 1976. A complexity measure. IEEE Transactions on software Engineering, 308-320.
[16]
Moumane K., Idri A., Abran A., Usability evaluation of mobile applications using iso 9241 and iso 25062 standards, SpringerPlus 5 (2016) 548.
[17]
Mushtaq Z., Rasool G., Shehzad B., Multilingual source code analysis: A systematic literature review, IEEE Access 5 (2017) 11307–11336.
[18]
Nguyen, T.D., Vanderdonckt, J., 2012. User interface master detail pattern on android, in: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems, pp. 299–304.
[19]
Nuez-Varela A.S., Prez-Gonzalez H.G., Martnez-Perez F.E., Soubervielle-Montalvo C, Source code metrics, J. Syst. Softw. 128 (2017) 164–197.
[20]
Rahman, A., Pradhan, P., Partho, A., Williams, L., 2017. Predicting android application security and privacy risk with static code metrics, in: 2017 IEEE/ACM 4th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems (MOBILESoft), pp. 149–153.
[21]
Riegler, A., Holzmann, C, 2015. Ui-cat: calculating user interface complexity metrics for mobile applications, in: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia, pp. 390–394.
[22]
Rosenberg L.H., Hyatt L.E., Software quality metrics for object-oriented environments, Crosstalk journal 10 (1997) 1–6.
[23]
Sadeghi, A., Esfahani, N., Malek, S., 2017. Mning mobile app markets for prioritization of security assessment effort, in: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on App Market Analytics, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. pp. 1–7.
[24]
Saleh, A., Ismail, R., Fabil, N., 2017. Evaluating usability for mobile application: A mauem approach, in: Proceedings of the 2017 International Conference on Software and E-Business, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. p. 71-77.
[25]
Trower, J., Gray, J., 2015. Blockly language creation and applications: Visual programming for media computation and bluetooth robotics control, in: Proceedings of the 46th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pp. 5–5.
[26]
Wetchakorn, T, Prompoon, N., 2015. Method for mobile user interface design patterns creation for ios platform, in: 2015 12th International Joint Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (JCSSE), pp. 150–155.
[27]
Wolber, D., Abelson, H., Sperms, E., Looney, L., 2011. App Inventor. “ O’Reilly Media, Inc.”.
[28]
Yáñez Gómez R., Cascado Caballero D., Sevillano J.L., Heuristic evaluation on mobile interfaces: A new checklist, The Scientific World Journal (2014) 2014.
[29]
Zha, R., 2019. Improving the usability of mobile application user review collection. Master’s thesis. Tampere University. Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences. M.Sc. thesis.
Index Terms
- User Interface Matters: Analysing the Complexity of Mobile Applications from a Visual Perspective
Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.
Recommendations
Insights into layout patterns of mobile user interfaces by an automatic analysis of android apps
EICS '13: Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systemsMobile phones recently evolved into smartphones that provide a wide range of services. One aspect that differentiates smartphones from their predecessor is the app model. Users can easily install third party applications from central mobile application ...
Extracting Mapping Relations for Mobile User Interface Transformation
Internetware '19: Proceedings of the 11th Asia-Pacific Symposium on InternetwareThe development of mobile apps has become the current mantra for any business' success. The rise of many types of mobile devices and mobile OS has instantly created the need to develop multiple versions for the same app. In order to grasp as much market ...
Transportable Applications Environment (TAE) Plus user interface designer WorkBench
CHI '92: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsTAE Plus was built at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to support the building of GUI user interfaces for highly interactive applications, such as realtime processing systems and scientific analysis system. TAE Plus is designed as a productivity tool ...
Comments
Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
Copyright © 2021.
Publisher
Elsevier Science Publishers B. V.
Netherlands
Publication History
Published: 01 January 2021
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 0Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)0
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 03 Oct 2024
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
View options
Get Access
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in