Abstract:

The development of mobile technologies has driven growth in the smartphone market, marked by the launch of the iPhone in 2007 and iPad in 2010. The subsequent adoption of appstores, marketplaces for mobile applications that run in such devices, has led to the popularization and simplification of development and commercialization of mobile applications, and hence to their wider availability. However, many of the apllications in the market suffer from poor user experience (UX). With this study, the researchers have explored if students and consumers perceive good UX as an important factor in the succes of their application in appstores, and how it affects user ratings and feedback in the context of graphical industries. This research describes the range of design and UX resources and services provided by different vendors to their third-party developers. After selection of specific graphical applications of developers, students and customers utilized different methods for UX improvement and gathered feedback on it. The findings are that end-users perceptions of the different apllications can be measured easily with different instruments on usability. Still, the UX of an application, especially for the graphical industries, extends the user interface and interaction issues of the application itself. The results indicate that the methods used for measuring UX rely heavily on external factors such as network quality and reliability of third-party services.

Keywords:

User experience, mobile apllications, app stores, application design, usability testing, UX evaluation.