Evaluation of Pedometer Interfaces for Mobile Apps

Abstract

The use of mobile health apps has been on the rise, as they allow people to get their health information more conveniently. Many people are using their mobile health apps to track their health status (KC et al., 2021), but there are known issues with people being unable to use their health apps effectively due to poor design. According to Wildebos et al. (2019), if users are continuously failing to get the information they need, they could develop feelings of insecurity and stop using the app. To mitigate these negative interface design impacts, Universal Design Principles (Story, 1998) and Gestalt’s Principle of Perceptual Grouping (Smith-Gratto & Fisher, 1999) could be used to improve the interfaces. In the present study, we evaluated several interfaces of pedometer apps that varied in terms of flexibility (low and high) and three levels of simplicity (simple, intermediate, complex). Ninety six participants were recruited from MTurk. The participants responded to questions on a survey that require them to extract information from a pedometer interface. After answering the comprehension questions for the specific interface, participants were asked to indicate their perceived ease of use (Brooke, 1996) and the likelihood of utilizing the pedometer app (Pasha & Indrawati, 2020). We found that participants had higher accuracy scores with the interface that was intermediate in terms of simplicity, but they preferred the simple or complex interface design. Results of this study suggest that users may not prefer designs that lead to better task performance and designers will need to balance features that enhance performance versus those that users find to be more attractive or desirable for continued use.

Keywords: Universal Design Principle, Gestalt’s Principles of Perceptual Grouping, Mobile Health App, Interface, Ease of Use, Continuance of Use

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003021