Toward a compare and contrast framework for COVID-19 contact tracing mobile applications: a look at usability

This paper reports on the progress in the project COVIGILANT, which is aimed at developing an evaluation taxonomy for Contact Tracing Applications (CTAs) for COVID-19. Specifically, this article describes the development of Usability, one pillar of the COVIGILANT taxonomy, discussing the classification and decision-making processes, and the initial model validation. The validation process was undertaken in two stages. First, we validated how the Usability pillar could be used to evaluate the Irish Health Services Executive (HSE) COVID-19 CTA. While this supported many of the attributes that we had within the Usability pillar, it also identified issues. We made amendments based on these, and undertook a second study, this time evaluating 4 CTAs used in other countries. This has led to the completion of the Usability pillar, which can now be used to evaluate global CTAs.