An Exploratory Study on the Relation between User Interface Complexity and the Perceived Quality

The number of mobile applications has increased drastically in the past few years. Some applications are superior to the others in terms of user-perceived quality. User-perceived quality can be defined as the user’s opinion of a product. For mobile applications, it can be quantified by the number of downloads and ratings. Earlier studies suggested that user interface (UI) barriers (i.e., input or output challenges) can affect the user-perceived quality of mobile applications. In this paper, we explore the relation between UI complexity and user-perceived quality in Android applications. Furthermore, we strive to provide guidelines for the proper amount of UI complexity that helps an application achieve high user-perceived quality through an empirical study on 1,292 mobile applications in 8 different categories.