Investigating usability of mobile health applications in Bangladesh

Abstract

Background: Lack of usability can be a major barrier for the rapid adoption of mobile services. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the usability of Mobile Health applications in Bangladesh. Method: We followed a 3-stage approach in our research. First, we conducted a keyword-based application search in the popular app stores. We followed the affinity diagram approach and clustered the found applications into nine groups. Second, we randomly selected four apps from each group (36 apps in total) and conducted a heuristic evaluation. Finally, we selected the highest downloaded app from each group and conducted user studies with 30 participants. Results: We found 61% usability problems are catastrophe or major in nature from heuristic inspection. The most (21%) violated heuristic is aesthetic and minimalist design. The user studies revealed low System Usability Scale (SUS) scores for those apps that had a high number of usability problems based on the heuristic evaluation. Thus, the results of heuristic evaluation and user studies complement each other. Conclusion: Overall, the findings suggest that the usability of the mobile health apps in Bangladesh is not satisfactory in general and could be a potential barrier for wider adoption of mobile health services.

Understanding the determinants of mHealth apps adoption in Bangladesh: A SEM-Neural network approach

“…Thus, numerous mHealth activities are already under process in developing countries especially Bangladesh. Overall, the findings suggest that the usability of the mHealth apps in Bangladesh is not satisfactory in general and could be a potential barrier for wider adoption of mHealth services (Islam et al, 2020). Many private and public sector have invested millions of dollar in this domain.…”

“…Though, a handful number of researches have been conducted on mHealth adoption and reported the key contributors, only a few numbers of studies have been explicitly focused on mHealth apps adoption in the context of Bangladesh (i.e. Islam et al, 2020;Rahman et al, 2018;Alam et al, 2020;Karim et al, 2016).…”

A Review on the Mobile Applications Developed for COVID-19: An Exploratory Analysis

“…Some apps provide virtual assistance through interacting with people in natural language and voice. 3) Current status -Most of the applications (i.e., 18 out of 25 applications) provide the current status and statistics from a local (specific-country context) and a global perspective through data-sheets and data visualizations. Such status includes the number of confirmed infected people, recovery, death, incubation period, etc.…”

A Systematic Review of the Digital Interventions for Fighting COVID-19: The Bangladesh Perspective

“…Finally, only a few mobile applications have been developed for coronavirus so far. We note that prior research found that most mobile health applications developed in Bangladesh suffer from usability problems [76] – [78] . Prior works suggest that usability is the key for wider adoption and continued use of services [79] .…”