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Mobile learning has seen tremendous growth over the years. Like any other software application, usability is one of the key concerns in its successful implementation. There is a lack of study that provides a comprehensive overview of usability testing of mobile learning applications. Motivated by this a mapping study is conducted.

A systematic mapping study was conducted using 51 papers retrieved from the Scopus database published between 2005 and 2022 that reported on usability testing of mobile learning applications.

The key findings suggest that research is expected to expand in the near future. User-based testing is the commonly used method, while data are collected mainly through questionnaires, observation and interviews. Testing is mainly conducted in a controlled environment.

The study provides (1) an evidence-based discussion on usability testing of mobile learning applications, (2) an up-to-date map on state of the art on usability testing of mobile learning applications and (3) providing direction for further research to scientifically strengthen the field.

Mobile applications affect our everyday activities and have become more and more information centric. Effort estimation for mobile application is an essential factor to consider in the development cycle. Due to feature complexities and size, effort estimation of mobile applications poses a continued challenge for developers. This paper attempts to adapt COSMIC Function Point and Unified Modeling Language (UML) techniques to estimate the size of a given mobile application. The COSMIC concepts capture data movements of the functional processes whereas the UML class analyzes them. We utilize the Use Case Diagrams, sequence diagrams and class diagrams for mapping the Function user requirements for sizing mobile applications. We further present a new size measurement technique; Unadjusted Mobile COSMIC Function points (UMCFP) to get the functional size of mobile application using Mobile Complex Factors as an input. In this study eight mobile applications were analyzed using UMCFP, Function Point Analysis and COSMIC Function Point. The results were compared with the actual size of previous Mobile application projects.

With the increasing number of mobile applications, efficiently recommending mobile applications to users has become a challenging problem. Although existing mobile application recommendation approaches based on user attributes and behaviors have achieved notable effectiveness, they overlook the diffusion patterns and interdependencies of topic-specific mobile applications among user groups. mobile applications among user groups. This paper aims to capture the diffusion patterns and interdependencies of mobile applications among user groups. To achieve this, a topic-aware neural network-based mobile application recommendation method, referred to as TN-MR, is proposed.

In this method, first, the user representations are enhanced by introducing a topic-aware attention layer, which captures both the topic context and the diffusion history context. Second, it exploits a time-decay mechanism to simulate changes in user interest. Multitopic user representations are aggregated by the time decay module to output the user representations of cascading representations under multiple topics. Finally, user scores that are likely to download the mobile application are predicted and ranked.

Experimental comparisons and analyses were conducted on the actual 360App data set, and the results demonstrate that the effectiveness of mobile application recommendations can be significantly improved by using TN-MR.

In this paper, the authors propose a mobile application recommendation method based on topic-aware attention networks. By capturing the diffusion patterns and dependencies of mobile applications, it effectively assists users in selecting their applications of interest from thousands of options, significantly improving the accuracy of mobile application recommendations.

This paper aims to investigate the causal inferences between mobile application adoption and changes in travelers’ purchasing behavior regarding services supported by the travel and tourism industry.

Using a quasi-experiment conducted by an airline, data sets from more than 10,000 travelers were collected, and hypotheses were tested using propensity score matching and difference-in-difference methods.

Mobile application adoption has a significant positive effect on the total purchasing frequency of services and a significant adverse effect on booking tickets in advance and purchasing frequency from self-owned websites. Besides, this finding also suggested that members or travelers who had high average purchases in the past tend to buy more air tickets on average after mobile application adoption, while the number of days to book tickets in advance and purchase auxiliary services declined after mobile application adoption. However, males purchased more auxiliary services via mobile applications.

The study is based on the causal effect of mobile application adoption on purchasing behavior. Nevertheless, the theoretical basis remains relatively weak. Furthermore, the underlying mechanisms that cause the changes in purchasing behavior via mobile applications need to be elucidated.

This study enriches the hospitality and tourism literature on mobile application adoptions, multichannel purchasing behavior and revenue management. First, a quasi-experimental design is used to verify a causal relationship between mobile applications’ adoption and travelers’ purchasing behavior in the travel and tourism industry. Second, this study adds to examining travelers’ multichannel purchasing behavior in the travel and tourism industry. Third, this work enriches the current literature that explores auxiliary services and revenue management in the travel industry.

Mobile application adoption significantly impacted the travel and tourism industry. Besides, To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first empirical studies that examined changes in purchasing behavior due to mobile application adoption from the perspective of service type. The findings provide the first evidence of the impact of mobile application adoption on service purchasing in the travel industry.

With the launch of mobile applications to reduce food waste, this study reviews scholarly articles to answer the questions: (1) What research topics are extensively discussed in relation to food waste mobile applications (FWMA)? (2) How do these applications impact food waste and food poverty? (3) At which stage of the supply chain are digital applications employed?

This paper conducts a systematic literature review of scholarly articles on the topic of mobile applications and food waste to answer three research questions.

The article provides a definition of mobile applications to reduce food waste. Most published studies on mobile applications are from developed countries. Over half of the applications address procurement and consumption along the supply chain. The applications are categorized by food saving method and used in studies on innovation management, platform relations and performance, the supply chain activities impacted and platform acceptance.

The articles and applications analyzed suggest more quantitative studies. A wider range of cases in diverse cultural settings is needed, as well as analyses of the factors influencing the development, performance and market acceptance of platforms.

This study is the first study to systematically review the relevant scholarly contributions related to mobile applications, an innovative practice that helps reduce food waste. It allows making an initial progress report on the research carried out.

This study aims to analyze the effects of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions on the behavioral intention of using mobile health applications, especially during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

A survey was developed using an online survey platform and distributed to Indonesian consumers for three weeks, and 149 usable responses were obtained. The principal component analysis, linear regression and analysis of variance tests were performed to test the validity and reliability of the measurement model and the hypothesized relationships among constructs.

Surprisingly, unlike previous studies on IT adoption, the findings show that social influence has no significant impact on behavioral intention. Facilitating conditions have a very weak to almost no significant impact on behavioral intention to use mobile health applications.

This research is conducted during pandemic COVID-19 where using mobile health apps is a must. In the future this research can be expanded as comparison study after the pandemic COVID-19 stated.

The result implies that digital technologies adoption intention is strongly affected by performance expectancy and effort expectancy, with performance expectancy as the most significant predictor. Nonetheless, the interaction of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence and facilitating conditions influences behavioral intention significantly. Therefore, social influence and facilitating conditions are still important even with very insignificant effects.

To improve consumers’ behavioral intention to use mobile health applications, application providers should promote mobile health applications as useful telemedicine tools by primarily focusing on the application performance and usage experience.

This study examined the determinants of mobile health (M-Health) application, adoption, usage and discontinuation among corporate workers diagnosed with hypertension and diabetes in Ghana.

The diffusion innovation and reasoned action theories were employed using an exploratory design. Three hundred corporate workers diagnosed with diabetes and hypertension from three health facilities for the past six months were sampled for the study using a multi-stage sampling technique and administered questionnaires. Descriptive statistics and logistic regression tools were employed in the analysis of data.

The study found a significant number of factors influencing m-health applications adoption, usage and discontinuity. These factors include nature and demand of job, perceived advantage, compatibility, complexity, triability, aesthetics and trust. Aesthetics emerged as the strongest predictive factor for the adoption, usage and discontinuity of use among diabetic and hypertensive corporate workers. With the adoption of M-Health applications, compatibility, as well as nature and demand of job, were significant predictors. With the usage of M-Health applications, complexity, triability, aesthetics and trust were significant predictors. Moreover, perceived advantage, compatibility, complexity and triability influenced significantly the choice to discontinue using M-Health applications. The study concluded that M-Health application functionalities play a valuable role in patients’ intention to adopt, use and discontinue the use of an M-Health application in Ghana.

This exploratory study offers in-depth insight into how major M-Health application features affect its adoption, usage and discontinuity, providing crucial information for future research and the improvement of chronic condition healthcare delivery.

This paper aims to prove the following hypothesis Problem Statement: HYPOTHESIS (1) User Experience collection of mobile applications can be done using the Crowdsourcing mechanism; (2) User Experience collection of mobile applications are influenced by the mindset of Crowdmembers, culture/ethnicity/social background, ease of interface use and rewards, among other factors.

The authors of this paper, did a literature review first to find if Crowdsourcing was applicable and a used method to solve problems in Software Engineering. This helped us to narrow down the application of Crowdsourcing to the Requirements Engineering-Usability (User Experience) collection. User experience collection of two Malayalam language-based mobile applications, AarogyaSetu and BevQ was done as the next step. Incorporating findings from Study I, another study using AarogyaSetu and Manglish was launched as Study II. The results from both cases were consolidated and analyzed. Significant concerns relating to expectations of Crowd members with User Experience collection were unraveled and the purpose of Study was accomplished.

(1) Crowdsourcing is and can be used in Software Engineering activities. (2) Crowd members have expectations (motivating factors) of User Interface and other elements that enable them to be an effective contributor. (3) An individual’s environment and mindset (character) are influential in him becoming a contributor in Crowdsourcing. (4) Culture and social practices of a region strongly affects the crowd-participating decision of an individual.

This is purely self-done work. The value of this research work is two-fold. Crowdsourcing is endorsed significant in Software Engineering tasks, especially in User Experience collection of mobile applications. Two, the Crowd service requesters can be careful about designing the questionnaire for Crowdsourcing. They have to be aware and prepared to meet the expectations of the Crowd. This can ensure the active participation of potential contributors. Future researchers can use the results of this work to base their research on similar purposes.

This study aims to determine college/university students’ mobile phone practices to understand key user preferences and set a baseline understanding for the development of prospective library informational mobile services.

This study is based on the results of an online-survey method. The authors recruited students majoring in the Information Science program in School of Information at Pratt Institute (USA) (74 participants) and in Kyiv National University of Cultural and Arts (Ukraine) (89 participants).

The general trends in the use of mobile technologies by American and Ukrainian students were identified. Key components of library mobile services are offered. Such services may include information and reference service via messengers; development of library mobile applications of audio and video content; access to educational, scientific, popular science literature and fiction; and supplementing online services with library chatbots.

This study was limited to only students majoring in information science at university; however, the data obtained helps outline several general trends common to student youth who are actively working with information.

The obtained results will be useful in the practical activities of libraries and other information institutions for the development of a comprehensive information service based on mobile technology.

This study contributes to understanding how to improve library informational service considering users habits and preferences. Libraries management and librarians can use the findings as a basis for prioritizing the improvement of library informational mobile service.

Gamification unlocks unprecedented opportunities in healthcare, wellness and lifestyle context. In this scenario, by leveraging on such an approach, information technologies now enabled gamification-based mobile applications primarily employed in health and wellness contexts, focusing on areas such as disease prevention, self-management, medication adherence and telehealth programs. The synergistic integration of gamification-based methodologies in conjunction with the utilization of digital tools, (e.g. as for Internet of Things, mobile applications) for the realm of digital therapeutics (DTx), thus unveiled powerful approaches and paradigms, yielding innovative applications that, through the harnessing of sensors and software-based systems, transform healthcare maintenance, wellness and lifestyle into an engaging pursuit, as a game. This paper explores the factors influencing individuals' intention to autonomously utilize mobile gamification-based apps for self-care and wellness maintenance.

Through explorative research designs an experiment has been conducted among a sample of 376 participants regarding the use of a fictitious gamification-based DTx solution, consisting in a mobile app namely “Health'n’Fit”.

Findings from an experiment conducted with a sample of 460 participants shed light on the possible antecedents and consequents of gamification. Results of the SEM model indicate that customization (CU), trust (TR), mobility (MO) and social value (SV) are the main determinants, although at a different extent of the playful experience; Moreover, gamification positively impacts attitudes and, in turn, perceived usefulness, intention to use and behavioral intentions.

This paper offers a dual-pronged approach that holds practical significance in the realm of healthcare innovation. First, the authors delve into the antecedents shaping individuals' intention to engage with gamification-based DTx, unraveling the factors that influence user adoption. Beyond this, the authors extend their focus to the realm of healthcare service design. By harnessing the potential of gamification and technology, the authors illuminate pathways to conceptualize and create novel healthcare services. This work not only identifies the building blocks of user engagement but also serves as a guide to innovatively craft healthcare solutions that leverage this amalgamation of technology and gamification, contributing to the evolution of modern healthcare paradigms.

In a social context, the paper introduces pioneering technological synergies that merge gamification and DTx to enhance individuals' health and wellness maintenance. By proposing innovative combinations, the authors present novel avenues for promoting healthier lifestyles and behavior change. This not only underscores the potential of technology to positively impact individuals but also highlights the significance of aligning technological advancements with societal well-being. As the research advocates for these innovative solutions, it reinforces the importance of collaborative technological and marketing endeavors, ultimately contributing to the betterment of society as a whole.

This is the first paper exploring the combined effect of gamification and DTx, by shedding light on the peculiarities of both the antecedents of individuals' intention to use such combined technologies.