Abstract: In the last decade, there has been an exponential growth in use of mobile phones among people. Smart phone invention has digitized life of a common man especially after introduction of 3G/4G technology. People are used to use Internet on the move because of this advancement in technology. This advancement has also motivated usability design researchers to propose more usable designs for both smart phones and web sites. This work focuses on evaluation of web usability of mobile phones as well as usability of university web sites. Evaluation is performed on the most popular mobile phones required by the most common mobile users. Selection of the most popular mobile devices, the most common mobile users and their web usage is done by conducting a very detailed survey in the local market. Survey concludes that students and labors are the most common buyers of mobile phones and we choose three mobiles phones from the category of most popular phones that are iPhone (iPhone 4 precisely), Q-Mobile (Q Mobile A35) and Windows phone (Lumia 535). Six participants (three male and three females) are selected for fully detailed and rigorous task-based usability testing with “think aloud” technique. Task scenarios are defined to evaluate the usability of both i.e. smart phones and chosen university web sites. From results of usability testing, we find out that iPhone has better usability design as far as its response time is concerned while Q Mobile ranks second and Microsoft Windows phone takes last position in this ranking. Usability evaluation of university web sites on these mobile phones concludes that web site of Islamia university of Bahawalpur (I.U.B, Bahawalpur) has better mobile usability design and Bahauddin Zakariya university (BZU, Multan) and NFC Institute of Engineering and Technology NFCIET, Multan) second and third respectively and while web site of Institute of Southern Punjab (ISP, Multan) comes last when measured in terms of task completion time. All tests are performed on wireless network when internet download speed is between 3MBPS to 3.2MBPS.

Muhammad Farhan, Malik Muhammad Saad Missen, Nadeem Akhtar, Muhammad Ali Nizamani, Amnah Firdous and Hina Asmat, “Evaluating Mobile Phones and Web Sites for Academic Information Needs” International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications(IJACSA), 7(10), 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.071051

@article{Farhan2016,
title = {Evaluating Mobile Phones and Web Sites for Academic Information Needs},
journal = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
doi = {10.14569/IJACSA.2016.071051},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.071051},
year = {2016},
publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
volume = {7},
number = {10},
author = {Muhammad Farhan and Malik Muhammad Saad Missen and Nadeem Akhtar and Muhammad Ali Nizamani and Amnah Firdous and Hina Asmat}
}