Usability Evaluation of COVID-19 Mobile Apps Using SUS

The whole world is going through an unprecedented crisis in the wake of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak resulting in lockdowns and imposing restrictions on economic activities. Governments are leveraging technology for identifying, monitoring, tracking, and containing active cases using mobile apps. Many countries have developed and deployed COVID-19 mobile apps to track patients, trace contacts of infected people, and provide services and facilities medicines to needy people. Indian government developed the “AarogyaSetu” app to track infected patients. However, the utility of these apps, their effectiveness, their usability score raises many open questions. A description of usability, usability attributes, and usability evaluation methods for such apps are presented in this chapter. The chapter also covers the results of practical experiments due to COVID-19 mobile apps from different countries and different apps developed by various states in India and shows the calculated usability score. This chapter will help the reader to understand the usability of COVID-19 mobile apps. A questionnaire collects usability attributes like efficiency, effectiveness, user satisfaction, user feedback, etc. In the questionnaire, usability evaluators prepared ten questions about each attribute, each question having five responses from strongly agree to strongly disagree. These responses are evaluated and used to calculate the app's usability score using the System Usability Scale (SUS) tool. Using this score will help governments and organizations identify problem areas and improve the usability score.