Examining the usability of mobile applications among undergraduate students using SUS and data mining techniques

Mobile Applications offer a new style to service sectors, for instance, in higher education, mobile applications are utilized to provide access to academic resources and academic services. Despite the wealth of mobile applications, they encounter various challenges that have attracted the interest of academia and software developers. The usability issues of mobile applications may cause performance degradation, resulting in the company's loss in terms of cost. This study aims to investigate the usability of the Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University (PSAU) mobile application by adopting data mining as a descriptive and predictive process. The first step was gathering data of the usability of the PSAU mobile application using the system usability scale. Afterwards, data was preprocessed into a suitable format to apply data mining methods. Specifically, the explanatory model has been employed to describe and investigate insights related to the usability factors and features of the PSAU mobile application. Furthermore, this study adopted the Four Clustering methods to segment the usability levels of the PSAU mobile application into homogenous groups based on user behavior. Additionally, the predictive model was used to build models for predicting the usability level and Grade and five classification algorithms were employed to predict the usability level and Grade. Most algorithms have given positive results in all performance indicators, where the accuracy rate achieved is 98% to 95% for most methods. The results revealed that the PSAU mobile application has an acceptable usability level, and the data mining methods helped to discover hidden patterns. Furthermore, the findings will help the developers and policymakers understand users' and stakeholders' behavior to find the most common usability problems for each group, and customize the PSAU mobile application.