A usability evaluation of UUM mobile for students app on IOS and Android platforms

• Main Authors: Hussain, Azham, Mkpojiogu, Emmanuel O. C., Abduljabbar, Ahmed Munadhil, Almadhagi, Amr Hail Ghilan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IP Publishing LLC 2018
• Subjects: QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
• Online Access: http://repo.uum.edu.my/25664/1/AIP%20CP%202016%202018%201%206%20A.pdf; http://repo.uum.edu.my/25664/; http://doi.org/10.1063/1.5055454

UUM Mobile for Students (MFS) app is an application meant to assist Universiti Utara Malaysia’s students to have easy access to their personal information and to communicate with one another. This app has not been formally evaluated for usability. This study therefore attempts to evaluate the mobile usability of this application on two mobile platforms: IOS and Android, the platforms mostly or commonly used by mobile users in UUM community. The outcome of the evaluation revealed that on the two platforms, the application has relatively good effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. However, it was observed there were some usability issues with the application. Post graduate students were not able to have access to their data and this shows that there were no data or result for them, so the UUM MFS developers should see how to resolve this problem. Also, the issue of student entering their names and passwords every time they want to login to the application was observed and should be resolved together with adding a save credential option so that they can save more time. Beside this, a help manual to help and guide particularly the new students who do not have experience on how to use the application should be provided. Finally, the paper suggests that the developers of the application need to add a very helpful feature, that is, the receive alert notification feature, in order to assist the students in term of their class schedule result, and payment etc. When these are taken care of, the observed and perceived usability of the app will improve and the app will be more satisfying to users.