Searching for a contextualised framework to inform testing methodology in the mobile arena

Pointon, Matthew (2017) Searching for a contextualised framework to inform testing methodology in the mobile arena. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

Smartphone take-up has grown exponentially, a growth that far exceeds any consumer technology in history. The growth of these technologies has created a cultural shift. Users are accessing, storing and retrieving digital information on more portable devices and doing so on the move. This cultural shift away from the stationary context (at home or at work) to a more mobile 24/7 way of accessing and consuming information is creating challenges.

Today’s developers and shapers of digital information (businesses, marketers, advertisers and web agencies, to name a few) need their applications to be workable to support the consumer in all contexts; at home, at work, in the lift, on the bus. When developing applications for these kinds of situations, changeable technological configurations and contexts are crucial to support the user experience and device interaction. In the early days of mobile computing researchers and usability professionals identified a range of challenges facing a tester’s ability to accurately map a mobile users experience. Testing strategies have stood the test of time, working extremely well in many lab-based configurations, but how do they fare in an increasingly mobile information society?

This Professional Doctorate aims to support and contribute to the mobile testing evolution and will adapt some existing practices to help keep pace with the phenomenon. This research will present a strategy that explores the development of new a framework (via a systematic review) to inform mobile testing. The framework builds upon themes within Human Information Behavior (HIB) and Mobile Human Computer Interaction (Mobile HCI). The research takes an interpretivist approach to investigate how this framework is applied to build and contextualise methods informing testing methodology in the mobile arena.

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