Expert‐Based Usability Evaluation of an mHealth Application for Older Adults: A Mixed‐Method Approach

Demographic aging presents new challenges and highlights the growing need for smart healthcare applications tailored to older adults. This paper presents the assessment of a mobile health application designed to facilitate the communication between healthcare providers and older adults, in the context of the Smart Bear Horizon 2020 project. The study describes a task-oriented usability assessment, applying a mixed-method approach through the combination of quantitative metrics of performance, standardized usability assessment questionnaires (ASQ and PSSUQ), and interaction logs, along with qualitative user comments. For this purpose, 50 ICT specialists in digital health were engaged who conducted a structured, expert-based diagnostic evaluation aimed at identifying usability barriers relevant to older adults prior to end-user testing. Usability was evaluated in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction, following the ISO 9241-11: 2018 standard. Results show an overall task completion rate of 83.5% and a PSSUQ score of 3.16 on a 7-point scale (lower scores indicating higher perceived usability). The findings reveal some critical usability issues, particularly in navigation efficiency and discoverability of specific system features. The study underlines the importance of an expert-based, mixed-methods usability evaluation as an initial step in the design of mHealth applications for older adults. This process is crucial in identifying and resolving key usability challenges before engaging vulnerable user populations. The proposed method provides actionable guidance for developing and evaluating more inclusive digital health technologies, supporting expert-first usability testing as a best practice in the eHealth domain.