Towards Usability Evaluation of Hybrid Mobile User Interfaces

Hybrid mobile applications are in an ongoing debate about their usability comparing with native mobile applications. Despite the cross-platform compatibility offered by hybrid apps, many developers tend to go native. This choice is due to some issues in hybrid apps like performance, usability, and security. As web technologies improvements take hold, many developers and technology executives find HTML5 usable for building mobile apps. In this context, we choose to work on assessing the usability of Hybrid User Interfaces (HUI). This study shows the results of an experiment conducted over four hybrid apps to identify their usability defects. A predefined list of 13 structural usability defects selected from literature has been used. Our aim is to create a usability defects base of examples of hybrid applications.