Exploring usability problems of mHealth applications developed for cervical cancer: An empirical study

OBJECTIVES: Nowadays, mobile health applications are developed to raise awareness and facilitate screening and treatment of cervical cancer, while a very few studies have been conducted focusing on the measurement and assurance of usability and exploring the acceptable user experience of such applications. Usability issues become a crucial concern for such cervical-cancer-related applications because users with diverse backgrounds in terms of education, information technology literacy, and geographic reasons are required to access those applications. The objective of this research is to evaluate the usability of mobile health applications developed for cervical cancer patients. METHODS: Two evaluation studies were conducted following the expert evaluation and a questionnaire-based user study. A total of four cervical-cancer-related applications that are focusing on the Awareness and Diagnosis theme were selected and each of the applications was evaluated by four usability experts. Then, a user study (n = 80) based on the Goal Question Metric was conducted to reveal the usability problems of four selected applications. Finally, findings of both evaluations were aggregated and analyzed. RESULTS: Both approaches showed that all applications suffer from several usability problems while “Cervical Cancer Guide” performs better and “Cervical Cancer Tracker” showed the least in performance from the usability perspective. Again, the Goal Question Metric performs noticeably better in assessing the learnability of the applications, while the analytical heuristic evaluation performs better in identifying the issues that cause user annoyance. CONCLUSION: The methodology adopted and the usability problems revealed through this study can be well utilized by the information technology professionals or user interface designers for designing, evaluating, and developing the cervical-cancer-related applications with enhanced usability and user experience.