Designing Better Mobile Apps: An Experimental Evaluation of Apple’s and Google’s Design Guidelines : How analysing the Human Interface Guidelines for iOS and Material Design for Android better our understanding of the usability challenges app users face a

Sammanfattning: When developing mobile apps, multiple factors must be considered when choosing between native or cross-platform technologies. The latter offers deployment of one codebase to multiple operating systems, such as Android and iOS. However, we argue that common design techniques lack an understanding of specific needs that separate iOS and Android users. This work presents an experimental approach using UI prototypes and existing native iOS and Android mobile applications to identify issues in usability of the two systems. We conduct a large amount of usability tests involving 34 participants and find that our prototypes and apps that follow Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines are easier to use in terms of one primary usability metric, notably task time, with a statistically significant difference between iOS and Android testers in two out of four tests. On this basis we investigate what key UI elements and design patterns cause disruptions in otherwise smooth User Experiences. Alongside documenting those, we also list key elements that influence the usability on a more general level. We provide suggestions to app designers and developers on avoiding designs that are considered producing usability issues by at least one of the two groups of iOS and Android users and on design patterns to improve the User Experience.