User Experience in Mobile Application Development: Developer and End-user Perceptions

The advancement in mobile technologies has driven growth in the smartphone market, marked by the launch of the iPhone in 2007. The subsequent adoption of appstores, marketplaces for mobile applications that run in such smartphones, has led to the popularization and simplification of development and commercialization of mobile applications, and hence to their wider availability. However, many of the applications in the market suffer from poor user experience (UX). In this thesis I explore if developers perceive good UX as an important factor in the success of their application in appstores, and how it affects user ratings and feedback in the context of Nokia’s appstore, Ovi Store. The work I conducted describes the range of design and UX resources and services provided by different vendors to their third-party developers. I then assisted the case of an app developer who had their app’s UX improved through a professional service, and utilized different methods to gather feedback on it. The findings are that developers are willing to adapt their development process to include UX methods to improve their apps. Still, the UX of an application, especially of applications that utilize cloud services, extends the user interface and interaction issues of the application itself, and I point out that it relies heavily on external factors such as network quality and reliability of third- party services. The discussion section brings forward how the measurement of the UX of applications should include concepts from Quality of Experience in its scope. Asiasanat:User experience, mobile applications, app stores, application design, usability testing, UX evaluatio