Assessing the Usability of Ridesharing Mobile Applications in Bangladesh: An Empirical Study

More than twenty ridesharing applications are operating in Bangladesh and provide relief to thousands of city dwellers. To enhance the acceptance and adoption of app-based ridesharing services in Bangladesh, the ridesharing applications need to be usable, user-friendly, and easily accessible to the mass people having different level of familiarity with Smartphone. Therefore, the objective of this article is to assess the usability of ridesharing mobile applications operating in Bangladesh. To attain this research objective, three ridesharing applications (Uber, Pathao and Obhai) were evaluated through Heuristic Evaluation to reveal the usability problems; while user experience on these applications were collected through a user study replicated with 60 participants. The results suggest that several usability issues exist in each application that need to be addressed, while the Patho showed better usability followed by the Uber and Obhai. Again, young aged people (¡=30 years) prefer the Pathao app, while middle aged people (31-50years) are inclined in using the Uber app. Furthermore, male and female both preferred to use the Uber in terms of efficiency and error management, while considering user satisfaction, learnability and memorability they preferred Pathao app followed by Uber and Obhai.