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.
Authors
- Mohammad Alshayeb (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7950-0099)
- Malak Baslyman (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4002-4480)
- Haifa Al‐Shammare (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-1522-1147)
Institutions
- 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)
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
- 0.00