Design, Development, and Evaluation of Mobile Interfaces with Universally Designed Contextual Cues

Abstract

The universal design of information and communication technology (UD-ICT) is a principle that ensures usability and accessibility in ICT products, and it gives the equal ability to participate in society for all people. The goal of the master thesis is to design, develop and evaluate a mobile interface with universally designed contextual cues. In other words, the purpose of the research question is to define that whether contextual cues feature on mobile interface has a positive effect on accessibility on a mobile platform and makes the interaction more simple, understandable and robust or not. To obtain thesis goal, research conducted from diverse scientific resources such as ACM Digital Library, IEEE Xplore, online resources, books as well as the author’s own research and accomplishment. To obtain project’s goal the author used qualitative methodology. In other words, the interview conducted as a data collection and user testing for the project to understand how precisely users’ feel regarding the contextual cues feature provided for two prototypes. The report presents the seven principles of universal design of information and communication technology to the project with collaboration with simplicity and intuitiveness in design. The essential of accessibility and usability in mobile interface design. The best practices of design to implement a simple and more interactable mobile interface. The research project compares two versions of mobile interface with and without contextual cues feature in order to learn and understand user’s behavior as well as to measure how contextual cues feature is efficient. Findings in this research illustrate that contextual cues feature in a mobile interface as a little box or as guidance is useful for users so that it makes value for them in interaction design. In other words, it makes way convenient for users to access hidden features in mobile applications. Universally designed of buttons as well as color scheme used in the book reader and banking system applications were very satisfied by participants so that they reflected that they had not any difficulties or challenges to understand the functionality of the book reader application and banking system prototypes. Research has given the author invaluable knowledge by reviewing different pieces of literature in humancomputer interaction in interface design. Additionally, research suggests that design for mobile interface based on seven principles of universal design has a profound effect on users’ satisfaction so that designers and interaction developers should consider these principles to make more understandable and interactable Products.