Developing a Complex User Interface for Mobile Data Collection Applications

The use of paper-based questionnaires for collecting data reveals several downsides, including logistical, cost-related and data quality issues. Despite the increasing digitization and the possibilities evolving from the latter, paper-based questionnaires remained ubiquitous in many application domains. Reasons for this may be insufficient IT knowledge from domain experts, the high development costs for dedicated digital solutions or the lack of domain-specific functionality and ease of use in existing software. In order to solve these issues, the QuestionSys framework aims to pursue a digital and easy-to-use approach for collecting data in large-scale scenarios. By providing software solutions for configuring digital questionnaires, executing those questionnaires on mobile devices and evaluating collected results, the framework attempts to support the entire data collection life cycle.

In the context of this thesis, a sophisticated user interface for the QuestionSys mobile application was developed. Thereby, an in-depth look at common usability and user interface guidelines for mobile operating systems is taken in this thesis. Further, this thesis presents potential use case scenarios for such an application and their requirements. The user interface is discussed and explained alongside various screenshots of the developed mobile application.