Usability of user-centric mobile application design from visually impaired people's perspective

Abstract

All over the world smartphone-based mobile applications increasing rapidly. In the context of this rapid growth, these mobile applications are progressively important in daily life to look for using social media, searching for medical information, applying for new opportunities, online shopping, and becoming well informed with their surroundings. In order to strengthen the interaction, accessibility, and usability for Visually Impaired People (VIP), the assistive mobile phone applications are materializing this trend. The Visually Impaired People (VIP) are encouraged to act many functions with the help of these mobile applications. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated in the year 2018 that worldwide there are approximately 1.3 billion people have affected by near and distance vision impairment. The quality of their life has suffered from visual impairments. Sometimes they have problems in their ability to work and establish in their personal relationships. Due to visual impairment, there are about 48% of people completely or moderately cut off from the people and things around them. These Visually Impaired People (VIP) are taking an interest in the use of mobile applications. The mobile applications that are available nowadays, they are totally inaccessible for VIP. The usability in these mobile applications is limited and these applications do not follow the accessibility guidelines of mobile. There is a serious need for a user-centric design of mobile applications that creates easiness for Visually Impaired People (VIP) to access mobile applications. The objective of this study is to describe the user-centric mobile application design with the involvement of VIP. There are two parts to this experiment. In the first part, VIP used the original mobile applications which are available on their mobile phones. After finishing and during the user interaction with original mobile phone applications, user feedback, observation, interview answers, and design recommendations were obtained. In the result of observation and interview in the first part, there are a lot of usability and accessibility problems during using mobile applications. In the second part, according to the results of the first part and with the involvement of VIP developed a user-centric design of a mobile application. The usability and time consumed on each task of this new design model were tested again by VIP. Results show that the performance of VIP improved with the use of a user-centric design model of mobile applications. System Usability Scale shows that the usability of VIP is increased with the use of a user-centric design of mobile applications. Finally, this paper focused attention on establishing equal opportunities, that the user-centric mobile application design should be implemented. In the future, this user-centric design of a mobile applications will be used to develop improved mobile applications for VIP. It would be also needed for mobile application developers to follow the user-centric design to develop new mobile applications for VIP.