Table 1.

Commonalities and differences between health app usability studies.

Authors	Year	Name of rating scale or checklist	Purpose	Consumer vs academic use	Number of dimensions	Number of raters
Stoyanov et al [16]	2015	Rating scalea: Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS)	Quality assessment	Academic	5	2
Nielsen [29]	1994	Checklistb: Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics	Rectify usability problems	Academic	10	3-5
Hundert et al [5]	2014	Checklist: 7 criteria	Headache diary app evaluation (scored against 7 criteria)	Both help to inform health care professionals and potential users on the best available e-diary apps for headaches	7	2
Belmon et al [30]	2015	Rating scale: for app features, not complete apps; Behavior Change Techniques (BCT)	Young adults’ opinion on BCT in physical activity apps	Consumer rating	3	N/A (179 young Dutch adults)
Patel et al [15]	2015	Rating scale: MARS [16]; (1) Weight loss/smoking cessation criterion score, (2) cultural appropriateness criterion score, and (3) cultural appropriateness criteria	Quality ranking	Academic	3 with 22, 23, and 6 sub-criteria, respectively	2
Yanez Gomez et al [31]	2014	Mobile-specific usability heuristic checklist	Heuristic evaluation	Academic	13	As per Nielsen [29]

^aA rating scale’s results align a numerical value to constructs such as Ease of Use.

^bA checklist can be a series of requirements necessary to achieve compliance without numerical values.