mUXSmellDetection: An LLM-Assisted Framework for Automated UX Smell Detection in Mobile Apps

Mobile applications increasingly support critical services, making high-quality user experience (UX) essential. Nevertheless, scalable UX evaluation remains challenging because it relies on expert judgment and heterogeneous evidence. This study introduces mUXSmellDetection, a catalog-driven, multi-modal framework for automated UX smell detection in Java-based Android applications. A Mobile UX Smells Catalog was developed, comprising 40 standardized UX smells with explicit detection rules and evidence requirements. The framework integrates runtime interaction logs collected through hybrid in-app and system-level logging, GUI screenshots, and Java AST-based code metadata, which are transformed into structured prompts for large language models (LLMs). The approach was evaluated on ten real-world Android applications using GPT-4o, GPT-5, and GPT-5 Thinking. Detection results were compared to an expert baseline established by three UX experts. GPT-5 achieved the highest overall performance, with 94.29% Precision, 89.19% Recall, and 91.67% F1-score. These findings indicate that multi-modal evidence enables scalable and practical automated UX smell detection.

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Publication Details

Journal
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
Published
2026-09-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2026.2730793
Primary Topic
Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

mUXSmellDetection: An LLM-Assisted Framework for Automated UX Smell Detection in Mobile Apps

Mohammad Alshayeb, Malak Baslyman, Haifa Al‐Shammare
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing
article

mUXSmellDetection: An LLM-Assisted Framework for Automated UX Smell Detection in Mobile Apps

Mohammad Alshayeb, Malak Baslyman, Haifa Al‐Shammare
article en

Abstract

Mobile applications increasingly support critical services, making high-quality user experience (UX) essential. Nevertheless, scalable UX evaluation remains challenging because it relies on expert judgment and heterogeneous evidence. This study introduces mUXSmellDetection, a catalog-driven, multi-modal framework for automated UX smell detection in Java-based Android applications. A Mobile UX Smells Catalog was developed, comprising 40 standardized UX smells with explicit detection rules and evidence requirements. The framework integrates runtime interaction logs collected through hybrid in-app and system-level logging, GUI screenshots, and Java AST-based code metadata, which are transformed into structured prompts for large language models (LLMs). The approach was evaluated on ten real-world Android applications using GPT-4o, GPT-5, and GPT-5 Thinking. Detection results were compared to an expert baseline established by three UX experts. GPT-5 achieved the highest overall performance, with 94.29% Precision, 89.19% Recall, and 91.67% F1-score. These findings indicate that multi-modal evidence enables scalable and practical automated UX smell detection.

International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction
Ministry of Economy and Finance (ML), King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (SA), Technical and Vocational University (IR), Intelligent Systems Research (United States) (US), Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris-Nord (FR)
Openalex Percentile: Top 5%
Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing
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