Remote Usability Study on mHealth app VirTelMed in a South African Setting

mHealth initiatives are becoming a growing solution for healthcare provision in developing countries. With the purpose of helping people from underserved areas to access physicians, the University of California Irvine has designed the mobile application VirTelMed. The objective of the study was to implement a usability study of VirTelMed in South Africa, with a focus in its design, usefulness and intuitiveness. The study is based on observing how the respondents attempt to perform a series of tasks, complemented with a semistructured interview. Namely, 16 persons were asked to test VirTelMed. In average, the respondents expressed satisfaction with its intuitiveness, usefulness and design. Remote usability studies that use methods such as participant observation and interviews allow software developers to test mHealth applications in diverse contexts, and obtain useful contributions. Participatory tools have to be featured to allow the testers to contribute remotely to the design of the applications. General Terms Mobile health, Software Testing, Mobile Applications.