Building High Usability Consumer-oriented Linked Data Mobile Apps

Abstract

This paper identifies good practice for building high usability Linked Data mobile apps, demonstrates these practices through a prototype app for a commercial service and evaluates the usability achieved. The state of the art in mobile Linked Data technologies and design guidelines for mobile search user interfaces were reviewed and analyzed to define good practice. This paper addresses the lack of research on mobile applications using Linked Data and consumer-oriented applications of Semantic Web technology. The user study consisted of a lab-based experimental investigations and surveys of real customers. The experiments showed that it is possible for a consumer-oriented Linked Data mobile application to achieve high usability, comparable to a commercial web-based solution on desktop devices. This provides evidence that our categorization of good practices in mobile Linked Data app design has broader applicability for mobile Linked Data applications.