Suggestions for App Developers

The first is that developing a mobile application is not an easy work as alone especially for novices due to the required expertise and different roles like acting as an analyst, designer, coder and tester. The corporates developing mobile apps have different-sized app development teams including product managers, UI (User Interface) and UX (User Experience) designers, developers, database experts, testers and so on. Even some big companies have separate teams for each of these roles, as mentioned by Expert 3. However, it is still possible to develop successful simple mobile applications if having full knowledge of overall mobile app development process, as referred by Expert 2. Therefore, instructors, educators and developers who intend to develop an educational mobile app should know the full process of app development.

Secondly, although this development model provides steps for developing a simple educational mobile app, it might also be used for developing big-scaled apps. The only thing the developer(s) should do differently is to divide the intended big-scaled app into modules and apply this development model for each module. That is because Expert 1 and Expert 2 has stated during the interview that they split the big-scaled app that they develop into parts, named modules, in order to develop it more efficiently and effectively thought this development model does not need it

since it is for developing simple educational mobile apps.

Thirdly, with respect to Analysis phase, the person who wants to develop a mobile app should know the fact that the results of requirement analysis conducted in Analysis phase can (or should) change or be modified during app development process due to the usability evaluations resulting in feature suggestions for the app. In the case study conducted in this study, although the required features have been extracted from literature possessing a vast information on it, these features were improved thanks to user testings providing additional feature suggestions by the representative users.

Related to theDesignphase, in order to evaluate the user interface or the prototype of the mobile app, the developers should apply not only usability inspection methods such as expert review using heuristics, but also user testing methods like user testing utilizing question-asking protocol.

While usability inspection methods are utilized in order to examine and evaluate whether each element of a user interface or prototype follows established usability principles, user testing methods are for testing the attributes of the product in order to see and check how user interface promotes the users to do their task (Folmer & Bosch, 2004). Therefore, both of them have own benefits. Besides, the development model proposed in this study recommends developers to conduct expert review using heuristicswith experts from various fields such as mobile app developers, software engineers, design experts and the expert of the domain the app is developed whereas there are various available usability inspection strategies, as mentioned in Chapter IV. Thus, it will be possible to perform systematically and neatly mobile app evaluations by evaluators, and it will also help the

developer understand more clearly the usability issues on UI or the prototype of the app and resolve them. On the other hand, utilizing question-asking protocol can be quite useful especially for the situations when the developers are unsure about where he/she should put UI elements such as buttons and features into the app. The users are sure on what they like or dislike and they can provide answers developers on those unsure issues, as in the case study conduct in this research. Lastly, the developers need to know about the effects of the evaluators’ role that experts mostly detect logical & technical issues such as whether a feature works fine and whether it provides user error controller, the representative users as evaluators mainly identify interface problems such as font style and wording used in the app.

Concerning to Development phase, the most important issue the developers should take into consideration during app coding is the compatibility of the platforms, services they use. Since a new platform or service has been released every day, the developers have plentiful options.

However, there might occur compatibility problems among them due to their novelty, implying that they might have not a well-established system. Even some code sets, working in one platform, might not work when using several platforms, which was happened during the case study. Therefore, the developers should be careful on compatibility issue. The second significant issue is dealing with unexpected errors/problems occurred during coding. No matter how much the developer is a professional developer, there is always the possibility of encountering unexpected errors/problems he/she cannot solve. For this kind of situations, one of the best ways is to apply the community of that code environment, platform or service. The bigger the community is, the higher to find a solution for those unexpected

errors/problems. Therefore, the developers should take into account to what extend the platform, service or code environment they use has a big community in an online environment when they code their apps. Lastly, the developers should test their apps on different mobile devices having different sizes and resolutions, as much as possible because each different mobile device model means another variable for the app. For this, one solution might be conducting an expert review and the user testing by using the evaluators’ mobile devices, as happened in the case study part of this research. In addition, testing the app in different devices of different users is crucial since there might be encountered another sort of problems or issues.

For instance, in the case study conducted in this research, the research tested

“Evaluation Matrix” app in five different models of Samsung and LG.

However, during implementing the app in a classroom environment, two students have encountered quite unexpected problems with the app, which was mentioned in Chapter 3- Section 4.1. Therefore, the developers should test their apps in different devices having different variations, as much as possible in the Development phase as preventive measures against possible problems that are confronted during implementing the app in a classroom environment.

With respect to Implementation & Evaluation phase, the class facilitators should be well informed about the app and provide user manual related to how to use it in classroom activities. Besides, these facilitators whether they is an instructor, teacher, teaching student or student are required to sufficiently explain students the app, how to use it and what will they perform with the app. In this study, one interviewed student has specified that she is confused about what she should do with “Evaluation

Matrix” app when the facilitator explained it in the beginning of the classroom activity. Additionally, students should be exposed to the app for at least a short time before starting to the classroom activity using it. Thus, it will be much easier for them to perform activities by using it. It should also be ensured that every student installed and launched the app without no problem since there were some students experienced difficulty on it during the case study conducted.