HAS COVID-19 AFFECTED SOFTWARE USABILITY: MOBILE ACCOUNTING SYSTEM AS A CASE

ABSTRACT

The importance of electronic systems has increased due to COVID-19 because of the mobility constraints which stimulates businesses to look for remote work supporting systems. So, businesses either rapidly adopted off-the shelf software or demanded the development of new software solutions. This causes usability concerns including new difficulties to businesses because of the low usability of the off-the shelf systems that were not designed to address the challenges during the pandemic. Also, the development of new software usually requires much time and may not produce usable software if all requirements are not sufficiently addressed. Furthermore, the factors affecting usability after the COVID-19 have not been identified in related studies. Therefore, this research empirically investigates the usability of software by developing a mobile accounting system and conducting qualitative analyses to evaluate the system and identify the usability factors in the post COVID-19 era. This research contributes the Rapid Application Participatory Development (RAPD) method which is used to develop the system because this method enables rapid development, sufficient requirements elicitation by allowing users to participate in the design process, and usability testing during the development. The results show that the RAPD method can be used to develop usable software and mobile applications. Also, in addition to the traditional usability factors, COVID-19 has created new usability factors including remote work, user experience, security, privacy, artificial intelligence and internet speed. © 2023 Little Lion Scientific.