Bridging Expert and User Perspectives: Comparing MARS and UMARS in Mobile Medical Applications Evaluating in the Context of UX Education
Karol Łazaruk, Piotr Tokarski, Marek Milosz, Malgorzata Plechawska-Wójcik, Sergio Luján-Mora
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (Edulearn 2026), Palma de Mallorca (Spain), June 29-July 1 2026.
(EDULEARN'26a)
Congreso internacional / International conference
Resumen
One of the most important subjects covered in courses designed to familiarize university IT students with user experience (UX) and graphical user interface (UI) design, as well as other areas of human-computer interaction (HCI), is the discussion of methods for evaluating interface quality. It is essential to introduce an appropriate method that is easily understandable for students, as well as simple and possible to be efficiently applied during classes with a rather limited amount of time. The literature presents numerous methods and tools for analyzing the quality of web and desktop application interfaces, but considerably fewer of them concern the evaluation of mobile applications. One of the most frequently used tools is the Mobile App Rating Scale (MARS), which is a robust and widely used solution for assessing the quality of mobile applications based on a standardized questionnaire. Despite its multidimensional approach for assessing application quality and high effectiveness of the evaluation, and thus high educational value, this method has several limitations. Firstly, it was designed primarily for UX experts. Secondly, its complex structure makes the assessment process relatively time-consuming, which may limit its use in a teaching environment. An alternative approach to responding to these limitations is to use a user-dedicated version of the MARS method, referred to as the user version of MARS (uMARS). In this variant, the number of questionnaire items has been reduced, and part of the expert assessment of information quality has been omitted. This approach is a viable, less specialized, and more time-efficient alternative, which can be especially useful when evaluating interfaces during teaching activities. The aim of this study is to compare the MARS and uMARS tools in the context of their use in the teaching process in higher education. In particular, the convergence of the obtained results and the usefulness of both tools in an academic teaching context were analyzed. Waterful, a medical mobile application of an educational nature, was selected as the object of the study. The research was conducted on a group of ten third-year computer science students participating in classes on HCI. The comparative analysis proved that both versions of the MARS method achieved a high level of consistency in the assessment of application quality. Furthermore, due to the smaller number of questions, the user version proved to be a more time-efficient tool, enabling a quick assessment of the interface quality. Therefore, uMARS may be a more suitable tool for students to perform interface evaluation tasks during teaching sessions when time constraints are present. At the same time, the full version of the MARS questionnaire allows students to acquire an expert perspective and promotes the development of accurate and multifaceted application quality analysis skills.