PLAIN: PLugin for predicting the usAbility of Mobile User INterface

Mobile user interfaces have the potential to improve the interaction between user and system by automatically tailoring the graphical user interface presentation according to the mobile devices. Recently, there is a myriad of works that addressed the problem of designing mobile user interfaces to various contexts of use. But, there are very few proposals about evaluating their quality. Using existing evaluation methods such as questionnaires and experts' evaluation are time-consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we propose an automatic evaluation plugin that allows detecting the defects related to the quality of mobile user interface. The plugin allows the measurement of several metrics that have been known to constitute the state of the art quality attributes that are used to predict the quality of interfaces from the usability perspective. For a given input mobile applications, it generates a list of defects identified using quantitative evaluation metrics and defects types. We evaluated our plugin on four open source mobile applications and the obtained results confirm that our tool can be used to accurately evaluate the quality of interfaces.