Usability study of ME2.0
Mobile context-aware applications execute in the background of hosts mobile devices. The applications source process and aggregate hosts contextual and personal information. This information is disclosed to ubiquitously pervasive services that adapt their offerings to individual preferences. Unfortunately, many developers continue to ignore the user perspective in context-aware application designs as they complicate their overall task and generate exponential requirements. The additional incorporation of privacy mechanisms in context-aware applications to safeguard context and personal information disclosures also complicates users tasks resulting to misconfigured or completely abandoned applications. Misconfigured applications give end-users a false assurance of privacy exposing them to comprising services. We present a usability study on Mobile Electronic Personality Version 2 a privacy enhanced context-aware mobile application for personalising ubiquitous services and adapting pervasive smart-spaces. We draw conclusions on key issues related to user needs, based on user interviews, surveys, prototypes and field evaluations. Users needs are evaluated against five themes, learn-ability, efficiency, memorability, errors, satisfaction and privacy contention. In addition, design layout preferences, privacy manageability and consensus design comprehension are also evaluated. Clarity of priorities in context-aware mobile applications shaped by usability studies effectively increases the acceptance of levels of potential users.
usability privacy personalised services context awareness ubiquitous computing