User Interface Design in Mobile Educational Applications

User interfaces are a crucial factor in ensuring the success of an application. Mobile Educational Applications not only provides the flexibility of learning, but also allows learners to learn at any time and any place. The purpose of this article is to investigate the factors affecting the design of the user interface in mobile educational applications.

The research method used in this research is quantitative content analysis method. The statistical population included scientific documents in EBSCO, Scopus, Springer, ProQuest, Google Scholar, and ScienceDirect databases for the period 2014-2019, using Internet searches with keywords for user interface design, mobile-based education and educational applications were searched. The volume of the research population consisted of 35 documents, which were selected 27 valid documents by targeted sampling method. In order to verify the selected researches, the articles were first categorized in terms of objectives, methodology and results, and their results were compared, and their similarities and differences were studied.

Placing the user in control, reducing the user’s memory load and making the interface consistent are three main rules in user interface design. Among the features of educational user interface design can be mentioned to the development of problem solving skills, fading the degree of scaffolding provided by the interface over time, supporting distributed problem solving, attracting learnerchr('39')s attention, enabling learners to interact with each other to facilitate retrieval of knowledge and supporting of management of cognitive load.

With recent advances in technology, there is now more flexibility to control the interface available to learners. At the same time there has been an increasing emphasis upon more interactive and collaborative approaches to using learning technologies. A mobile-based educational user interface design framework can enhance user performance with respect to cognitive performance and interaction which ensures better user experience.