Remote assessment of hybrid mobile applications: New approach in real environments

Inside the usability research field, mobile devices have gained a lot of importance. This kind of devices has improved exponentially. They have acquired personal computer working capabilities and small sensors that enrich their software applications. However, the development of the usability field for these applications and devices has not improved at such a fast pace. Although there are several standards and evaluation methodologies, there are no specific remote evaluation tools for dynamic environments, which are very representative of this type of device contexts. Consequently, this paper describes a remote assessment platform that records context in use properties and user interactions with the mobile device. A preliminary evaluation of the platform using a real hybrid mobile application is presented, where the interaction bias level introduced by the assessment platform is studied.