Are Mobile Spreadsheet Applications Usable?

1. Introduction

The spreadsheet application has become an integral part of the financial sector (Croll, 2005). The nature of this environment means that those working in this sector desire almost constant access to data contained within spreadsheets. This need cannot always be met with desktop or laptop applications because these devices are too large and cumbersome to be used in some environments. Advances in mobile phone technology mean that spreadsheet applications can be run on a mobile phone and this allows users to access spreadsheets virtually anywhere and at any time.

There are a number of known limitations to mobile devices in terms of screen size, processing power and connectivity and these limitations impact the way in which spreadsheets are used on these devices. These limitations have also introduced a number of usability issues which can affect the effectiveness and efficiency with which users can complete their work. The efficiency of mobile spreadsheet applications can vary by as much as 90% (Flood, 2011a).

This paper presents a pilot study on the use of spreadsheets on a mobile device and is structured as follows: Section 2 outlines some of the usability issues associated with mobile devices and describes how these issues can impact the spreadsheet application; Section 3 outlines the objectives of the study and the research questions it addresses. Section 4 of the paper describes the design of our study which compares using spreadsheets on a mobile device with using them on a desktop computer. Section 5 presents the results that were obtained. A number of limitations to this study are presented in Section 6. The study identified a number of issues that could be addressed through alterations to the mobile spreadsheet application. Section 7 of this paper outlines these changes and how they can address the issues identified by the study. The paper is then concluded in Section 8.