Abstract:
There has been an exponential growth in the usage of mobile applications in the last decade due to affordable access to smartphones and data services to a larger consumer base. Usability has been gradually known as an important quality element to determine the success of mobile applications. Personalization is one of the most important factors for usability enhancement of mobile applications. Sometimes personalization is known as customization. The aim of personalization is to support the user by providing the right service at the right moment. There is lot of research that has been done in different usability factors but very little attention has been given to personalization as an aspect of usability in mobile application. The aim of this study is to develop a model for evaluating the personalization of mobile applications. Different factors of evaluation model have been gathered through existing literature. For the purpose of validating our model we applied it on certain mobile applications in specific domain for example e-learning mobile applications. Applications we focused in our research were Coursera, Udacity, Udemy and Edx. To evaluate these applications survey was conducted based on the factors identified in model. However in our research results show that application have less focus personalization especially some important factors are missing. Application should improve as personalization aspect. The main personalization factors which are not included on e-learning applications are customizability, personalized content and Context awareness. These all factors are important for efficiency of personalization of mobile applications.
