Empirical Analysis of User Factors that Affect the User Interface Design in Mobile Applications

With the rapid advance of mobile computing technologies, the use of smartphones has increased and spread around the globe. There are more than 3.5 billion smartphone users worldwide which include a considerable proportion of non-generic users including children, the older people and users with disabilities. There are millions of applications that have been installed in those smartphones to cater to those users. User interface (UI) design is one of the most important aspects when developing a mobile application since the success of an application mainly relies on its usability and user experience (UX). In this research, first, we statistically analyzed the impact of user factors such as age, gender and education level on the usability of UI design in mobile applications. Second, the influence of the user's age on the frequency of usage of selected mobile applications was analyzed. For the second analysis, existing mobile applications were categorized into nine(09) categories based on their service domain such as E-commerce, Entertaining and Education. Then, the data about the usability of those applications were collected from 364 smartphone users in Sri Lanka. Here, we used a quantitative research method for data collection, involving an online questionnaire survey. Our analysis shows some interesting relationships between user factors and the usage of mobile applications. For example, it shows that the usability of user interfaces of mobile applications is highly correlated with age, gender and experience of smartphone usage. Moreover, the statistical analysis has proven that there is a significant relationship between the user's age and the usage of mobile application domains. In summary, this analysis provides some important insights about the user factors which help to design user-friendly and efficient user interfaces for mobile applications.