Evaluating Usability of Pregnancy Tracker Applications in Bangladesh: A Heuristic and Semiotic Evaluation

Mobile Applications, being one of the most essential parts, are spreading wings in almost every field of human life. Very recently, the mobile application has brought a revolution in clinical care that includes maternity health care and support. Over the years such applications gained wide adoptions in the developed countries. In developing countries like Bangladesh, understanding the user-needs and significance of pregnancy applications become more crucial concern to develop usable and user-friendly applications for the expecting mothers (users) with different biographical profiles in terms of their living area, literacy, and familiarity with mobile/computer usages. Therefore, the objective of this research is to evaluate the usability of maternity applications developed in context of Bangladesh, and to provide possible design recommendations for improving the overall usability and adoption of such applications. Two (`Maa' and `Aponjon') pregnancy tracking applications developed in context of Bangladesh were evaluated using the heuristic evaluation and semiotic evaluation methods. The study showed that both applications have several issues to address from usability perspective, while the `Maa' app showed a comparatively better usability than the `Aponjon' app.