Supporting adaptation of web applications to the mobile environment with automated usability evaluation

The year 2014 marked an important shift in theWeb's history, as users started to spend more time surfing the web using mobile devices than using desktop computers. However, today, a large proportion of websites are still not designed for good mobile device access. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes a new approach to adapting desktop-based web applications to the mobile environment. Our approach is supported by a task-based usability evaluation tool called MOBILICS, which is able to evaluate desktop-based web applications used in mobile devices. Based on the evaluation results, our tool provides detailed recommendations for fixing the detected usability problems. We conducted an experiment which demonstrates that our approach provides useful support for the adaptation of a desktop-based web application into a mobile version.