Investigating the Usability and Quality of Experience of Mobile Video-Conferencing Apps Among Bandwidth-Constrained Users in South Africa

In response to Covid-19 and global lockdowns, we have seen a surge in video-conferencing tools' usage to enable people to work from home and stay connected to family and friends. Although understanding the performance and the perceived quality of experience for users with bandwidth caps and poor internet connections could guide the design of video-conferencing apps, the usability of video-conferencing applications have been severely overlooked in developing countries like South Africa, where one-third of adults rely on mobile devices to access the internet and where the per-gigabyte data cost is some of the most expensive in Africa. Considering these numbers, we conduct a two-prong study where 1) we measure bandwidth consumption of different Android apps through bandwidth measurement experiments and 2) we conduct interviews with bandwidth-constrained users to better understand their perceptions of mobile videoconferencing apps. The key benefit of this study will be to inform organisations that seek to be inclusive about these tools' relative usability by letting them know about the factors influencing users' quality of experience