Qualitative approach to determining the relevant facets of mobile quality of educational social Web applications

Being a convenient replacement for their desktop counterparts, social Web applications are nowadays widely employed in diverse aspects of human endeavour, including education. Current body of knowledge on assessment of social Web applications is composed of studies that were mainly focused on quantitative measurement of their quality when they were used in their primary setting. On the other hand, there is a lack of studies related to the evaluation of social Web applications when they are employed on mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. This paper presents findings of the empirical study that was carried out with an objective to evaluate the mobile quality of social Web applications from qualitative perspective. For that purpose, the retrospective thinking aloud method was applied. Participants in the study were students from two different higher education institutions who completed predefined scenario of interaction with two social Web applications for collaborative writing: Google Docs and Zoho Docs. The most relevant facets of mobile quality in the context of social Web applications are uncovered and discussed.