An usability and universal design investigation into hidden user interface navigational elements

Abstract

With the trend towards simplicity starting to gain supremacy in digital design, designers are now being forced to adapt. One of the practical areas recommended for them is working within mobile user interfaces' navigational elements. Navigation in mobile applications has a crucial role in interacting with a mobile interface, and there are various opinions on how to implement such a capability best. Navigation is, without a doubt, a vital element to applications' design. Therefore, designers have to possess the ability to prioritize content without making navigation inaccessible and, in general, sacrificing usability. Mobile application designers have been choosing to hide their navigation mainly in recent times. While many people claim that an application design containing hidden navigation negatively impacts user experience’s metrics. Decreasing discoverability and increasing perceived task difficulty, it is hard not to use them; they are the best of the worst options available. The experimental work presented in this study looks at some of these hidden user interfaces navigational elements in mobile applications from a usability and Universal Design perspective. This thesis describes an investigative study of hidden navigational elements of mobile applications. For this purpose, two identical prototypes were developed and tested with users, one with hidden navigational elements and visible navigational elements based on time on tasks, task completion and error rate. A questionnaire was presented to get users’ insight about both prototypes on a Likert scale. The results and findings are that participants preferred prototypes with visible elements and found prototypes with hidden elements challenging to interact with. The interface with hidden elements does not meet the guidelines of WCAG and Universal Design’s principles.