On usability of data and services through mobile multitouch interfaces

Usability of digital interfaces is a crucial point for their success, but, if a lot of efforts have been devoted to the development of usable desktop Web in the last decades, more has to be done for mobile environment. Mobile apps, mobile web sites, conversational interfaces, wearable devices, ubiquitous computing: a lot of new technologies are rapidly emerging and traditional usability studies are barely able to adapt to them, addressing the new challenges that arise because of fragmentation. The aim of this work is to investigate the state of the art in mobile usability techniques and researches, and try to address the problem of a lack of suitable approaches to usability studies. In this work, the application of game mechanics to nongaming contexts—such as usability evaluation—is investigated. A simple mobile game application has been developed in order to collect a large amount of usage performance data produced by end-users in real world contexts. An analysis of the collected data is presented, comparing them with previous studies, and clarifying unexplored effects of device grip and screen size on usability metrics. Results show, as expected, that the increasing screen size negatively affects users performance in terms of speed and accuracy, and that device grips should be taken into consideration when designing interfaces. Results demonstrate that this data collection approach can be used to validate existing guidelines and renew them according to changes due to the evolution of hardware and software trends. Further studies have been conducted to understand what the emerging trends of mobile interfaces are, in order to figure out which new challenges usability studies will have to face up. Among the plethora of emerging hardware and software interfaces, a great, increasing, and renewed interest has been observed for conversational interfaces, notably bots. Hence this old, yet new, kind of interface has been chosen as an example of technology that would need detailed studies of usability, in order to be fully exploitable. Conversely to bots developed over the last decades, in the last couple of years, bots have been acquiring increasing capabilities and purposes more related with everyday tasks. The possibility of using online messaging applications as real development environments is one of the main reasons for the current spread of bots. Bots reside inside these messaging applications instead of being standalone systems with their own interface, letting users interact with them by means of already known interfaces. An overview of these online messaging platforms, highlighting bot characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages, is also provided, comparing them with mobile applications, in order to understand whether or not bots could possibly be a replacement of apps. Discussing the different characteristics of these technologies, it can be argued that bots will not substitute apps in the near future, but that for now they can be a valuable alternative in some cases, and that in the future of mobile and ubiquitous computing, additional interface changes will undoubtedly have to be faced by designers and developers. An example of usability study of modern bots is presented, using a heuristic evaluation, in order to understand advantages and lacks of traditional methods, when related to emerging technologies. Both the study of interaction modes for mobile apps and the study of textual bots on messaging platforms prompt the development of new approaches to usability, tailored to emerging trends and technologies, in order to capture their peculiarities. In this context, gamification can be an effective way of gathering large amounts of data to support usability studies.