ripcord

摘要

Mobile devices such as cellular phones are indispensable in our daily life. The success and penetration of the market of mobile services and applications does not only depend on good, innovative ideas, but also on their usability.Therefore several endeavors have been made to tackle these problems in order to provide suitable usability testing methods for user interfaces. But traditional testing methods cannot always be extended to mobile devices directly. In contrast to the widely standardized and static testing setup for Desktop PCs, the variety of physical device-specific characteristics as well as the highly dynamic context of use [5]. influences these methods.In this paper, we propose a novel approach for prototyping and testing mobile applications and services. It enables testing user interfaces and recording the interaction within context-of-use in early stages of the product development and therefore allows determining conceptional or design flaws before they can cause cost-intensive corrections or even refactoring of the product.Besides its direct applicability this approach allows us to elaborate if and how classical usability testing methods can be transferred to mobile devices and how they are influenced by the device-specific characteristics.